Karen Gunderson"Churning Sea (after Moby)"
Last year, William Siegal moved his gallery from the corner of Palace and Grant to a 5,000 square foot space in the Railyard. The move allowed him to hang the Andean textiles and Meso/South American, Chinese, southeast Asian, and African antiquities he has assembled over three decades next to mid-century and contemporary art. This aesthetic combo-platter could easily result in an unappealing visual cacophony, but not under the sharp eye of Siegal and his staff. Despite the fact that the works in this gallery span centuries of time and innumerable human perspectives, it works. This is true even of the Diego Rivera studies for the Detroit mural, hung next to a large case of mostly Pre-Columbian figurative sculptures in stone and clay. Both groupings share clean, graphic lines and simplistic, bold forms that describe figurative details with economical skill. All of the gallery objects share textural, sensual qualities that dominate any narrative or representative content. Siegal presents art that is graphic, formally dynamic, and sophisticated—work that hits the visual gut.
Currently intermixed with antiquities, mid-century art, and a contemporary stable of artists are works by six artists new to the gallery: three from New Mexico and three from New York. Their works are on view through November 21.
“ We chose artists for this show who are unique, whose work is not derivative,” explains Ylise Kessler, an art consultant who joined William Siegal Gallery a few months ago to curate and sell contemporary art. (This is a laudable intention, but the absolutely unique is rare and normally so off-kilter that it is initially rejected, particularly if the work lacks the current, socially accepted requirements of good taste.) The new artists represented by Siegal make work that is meticulously crafted, aesthetically pleasant, and in the very best sense of the word, decorative. Karen Gunderson’s paintings are painted with the blackest of black paint in rolling waves that seem inches thick. The surface is surprising thin, but the grooves created by the brush reflect light and suggest intense, implied depth. One painting, “Curning Sea”, which hangs near a window, reflects the blue tones of the New Mexico sky and is placed next to a huge black torso from 1976 by Pedro Coronel (a supurb juxtaposition). Another Gunderson, “Rounding the Cape”, reflects the yellow of the overhead lighting. As the viewer moves around the room, the waves of black paint appear to move as well. Gunderson’s paintings are quite hypnotic and perceptually fun.
But they are not derivative-free. In her artist’s statement, Gunderson says that, “My paintings are universally recognizable, and familiar to anyone who has ever seen the sea.” They are also familiar to anyone who has ever seen the graphite drawings or wood engravings of Vija Celmins, whose images of the sea are as much about light and movement as Gunderson’s, using exactly the same subject matter and composition. Celmins began her sea drawings in the 1960s.
Willy Bo Richardson grew up in Santa Fe, got his M.F.A. at Pratt, and returned to the southwest. His oil paintings are vertical washes of color, mostly greens, blues, and golds, that bleed into each other. The titles of the works suggest content outside of the formal abstraction, even though the paintings seem only to be about paint, color, line, and process. The vertical washes in “Poseidon” are curved slightly in such a way that the canvas itself seems warped. (Poseidon would strike the ground with his trident if offended, causing shipwrecks and earthquakes, but this may not be the interpretation Richardson intended.)
Patrick McFarlin’s tiny, thickly painted landscapes and still lifes, hung at varying distances from the wall, are the most highly saturated objects in William Siegal Gallery. McFarlin’s style references Bay Area figurative painting and Abstract Expressionism. Most of the images are deserted, southwestern spaces with dilapidated billboards or empty roads. In one painting, a billboard, surrounded by a yellow sky, reads simply “Peaches”. Yummy.
Cyrilla Mozenter"Tomb"
Cyrilla Mozenter hand sews wool into boxes that suggest architectural forms. Each sewn seam is animated with loose threads. These works, from Mozenter’s “Warm Snow” series, are sweet and tender like fairytales. They suggest a solitary childhood, where imagination is one’s best friend. In her artist’s statement, Mozenter says that she is “attempting to push felt to do what it doesn’t want to do while maintaining its integrity as a material.” She succeeds, but pushing the scale to near impossibility would be an exciting next step. Right now, the works are the size, and comfort level, of a microwave.
Chris Enos’s large format Polaroids of decaying flowers are technically beautiful, but the metaphorical suggestion (what is young and fresh decays, but the decay itself is beautiful, too) is a cliché one-liner. Enos has an eye for composition, color and scale that makes these photographs worth looking at anyway.
The most unique work is by New Yorker David Henderson, who creates other-worldly sculptures; each piece seems to float with one “finger” lightly touching the wall to steady itself. The Jetsons-like, bulbous, indefinable forms look like they were bashed by meteorites and somehow survived slick and sexy. Inspired by a 1928 pulp science novel given to him by his uncle, Henderson is a space-ship builder wanna-be. He designs his sculptures on the computer, makes positive shapes from a variety of materials from which he crafts molds, and uses the molds to form the final fiberglass and carbon fiber works.
David Henderson
"Blackbird"
Henderson’s sculptures are the reason to visit this show. He uses forms, processes, and materials that all refer back to his initial desire--to build a spacecraft—an idea, literal at first, that transformed into a series of interesting questions about weight, gravity, physics, and the perfection of imperfection. As visually gorgeous and meticulously crafted as Henderson’s sculptures are, they are not at all decorative.
New Artists New Work
Through November 21
William Siegal Gallery
540 S. Guadalupe Street, Santa Fe
505.820.3300
www.williamsiegal.com
This review was originally published in the November 7, 2008 issue of the Journal Santa Fe, in the column Object Lessons.
No comments:
Post a Comment