This being my first essay for an art show (I act and write plays), I thought I better listen to the Smiths tune lots and look up what “oscillate” and “wildly” mean. Oscillate means to swing back and forth with a steady uninterrupted rhythm and wildly is an adverb meaning extreme manner.
So the tune is great but I wasn’t sure what to write so. . . I met with the curators. They told me the show is made up of artists that use elements of collage in their work. A collage show sounds very dated and old school but these artists are anything but. The curators mentioned that collage can mean a throw-away in terms of ideas or materials or a whimsical notion or fleeting moment. These artists use disparate images and materials¬—yes, we are in a recession so some of the things they work with are cheaply found. There is a loss in modern lives and we are looking for direction and meaning. Basically the curators wanted to bring kindred spirits together and highlight artists who find something meaningful in the ephemeral.
Okay this was cool-helpful, sort of—but damn that Corona cost $7 bucks!!!
I recently finished the (bad for her but still interesting) novel The Black Prince by Iris Murdoch in which Murdoch has a character say “Art is to do with joy-play-the absurd.” This was a fitting and inspirational quote as I looked at the work and visited and talked with the artists that make up this group show: Tom Brauer, Maya Brym, Yvonne Buchanan, Angelina Gualdoni, Kristi Kent, Lucy Kim, S.E. Nash, Linnea Paskow, Dorene Quinn, Elisa Soliven, and Karla Wozniak. There is only one man and yes, he is a homo but the world (including the art world) is usually made up of all men or mostly men so it is refreshing. You got a problem? Just deal with it.
In their work these eleven artists all do what Murdoch’s character suggests—they find joy and play in our absurd times. Their source material might be a disparate as a deconstructed map of a childhood home filtered through a Genet-like sensibility—adding in trompe l’oeil and Dante’s “Inferno”—or a photo taken from a moving car: a fraction of a second of a life painstakingly painted with the multiple viewpoint perspectives of a typical U.S. environment. Or a painting inspired by a bad photograph taken with a cell phone camera of a reflection of an armless mannequin. Yes, these artists have very different sources but all have a feeling of collage in them. Collage to me is a sense of play: discovering meaning in the makeshift, improvising with materials and finding truth.
During my studio visits (which were a treat and a privilege) Tom Brauer’s “Dickweed” painting gave me a chubby. No. Seriously. I thought, “My god I’m getting a boner.” It had a trompe l’oeil surface and a cum stain (paint? or semen? I did not scratch and sniff). There were rainbow-like subway lines, with what looked like real pages of yellow lined paper folded back. It felt dangerous, gay, meticulous and bloody. I had to go home and jerk off.
Karla Wozniak’s painting “Battle Creek, MI” is a schizophrenic take on landscape painting with some elements cartoonish and others pure mood in a riot of color and styles with a piece of chalk stuck in the bottom right-hand corner of the painting. It has an amazingly worked-over surface and it is achingly beautiful. The blue shadow or line that runs from top left to bottom right conjures up the death of the auto industry and the loss of the American Dream, or at least the dilution of it. It speaks emotional volumes.
Linnea Paskow’s “Limbus” made me grab my chair and almost puke—literally, because it is so alive and full of movement. I was told to step back, take it in from farther away. I did as I was told but still needed to hang dizzily onto her kitchen chair and thought I might puke up that nice peach tea she made me. This weird world comes into focus as if we are in between two places, two worlds. A baby comes into view. Over there was a fist, and here was his head, and there was the other foot, here the arm. Our perspective is skewed, fucked upside down. This is all made up of torn up bits of magazines. I had a visceral response. Is that a mommy? Fish? Is this religious imagery? I looked closer and it was the coolest experience. Is this what a baby could see? We are in the birth canal and outside of it.
It was getting late, my dogs were tired (bad arches and Converse One Stars have no support) but we went down the hall to Maya Brym’s studio which was stinky because she had been painting. She was working on two pieces. One of them, “Collapsible Shoulder,” has this armless mannequin with a hot pink crotch area and stunning shadows and colors. The source material is a cell phone picture. Brym showed it to me: the world is layered, reflected, refracted shadows. The painting is sweet. There is a push/pull element with the colors and the surface. It was getting late. It was time to head out for a beer.
In the second week of studio visits, rain threatened. I headed up to Elisa Soliven’s studio in the Hunter MFA Building. The block was funky; the rain poured down. I was way early but had my reading materials: a bad/good murder mystery. Elisa arrived and took me up to her studio. All the work was good but there was a painting in the corner that was calling my name. It’s called “Only For You” and has elements of Outsider art naif painting with some Ross Bleckner and Jasper Johns thrown in for good measure. The painting seems to be slipping off the wall right in front of you. It is beautiful, unsettling and mysterious. Just when I think I’ve figured it out—NOT! Nice.
It was now torrentially down pouring. We were officially soaked and late and we headed to Williamsburg. Angelina Gualdoni was a very chill host and her work is very brave. It is evolving and moving toward the abstract. She is working with pours and absences: the spaces between. She was kind enough to show two pieces. In both paintings, the world is very much alive. In “Weavers” I’m not sure if the image is ‘e-’ or ‘de-’volving but it is doing something and fast! I kinda think that all the lines in “Mise En Scene” (the blue slash, the orange dash and the pink mass) are trying to make it back to the triangular shape down in the right. It feels like a homecoming. When the curators thanked her for being in the show, she was genuinely stoked to be included, as she was with a blue-chip Chicago gallery and no one thought to ask her to be in a show like this before. Her new pieces rock, very “oscillate wildly.”
The rain stopped a little and we resisted the temptation to try a blueberry flavored coffee at the Dunkin Donuts next door. We took a quickish ride to Kristi Kent’s studio. This Manhattan boy has never seen so much of Brooklyn. I got the borough tour via artists’ studios and I felt special. I liked it. We walked into Kent’s studio and I wanted to take home a piece, buy it right off the wall, but my walls and pockets aren’t big enough. The work in the studio was monumental, the size nearly recalling Warhol’s giant Mao at the Met. Kent is haunted by her neighbors. No, not the ones next door, the ones on her roof. The studio door to the rooftop was open. After a shaky box-assisted climb, you see this . . . colossal . . . what? Exhaust pipe? Fan? Duct? Furnace? Whatever it is, it haunts the work Kent makes in a kick ass way. “Stand” is startling, evoking marriage, terrorism and war. There is a danger here. The work is on the edge of camp but the limited palette, empty space and deft use of materials keep camp firmly at bay.
At this point “Mamma’s hungry” so we headed for Thai in Park Slope, a part of Brooklyn that I have actually been in before. After some awesome chow with full, happy tummies and a wee bit poopsie, we headed to the studio of Lucy Kim in Crown Heights. The blocks here are beautiful, tree lined. Kim’s studio door opened and revealed an obviously inspired artist’s space. New work was everywhere. She brings us over to her work table and shows us the piece “Still Life with bat, fish, and dirt.” She is so fucking skilled! I thought the piece was a mockup of the piece. I’m like “when you gonna paint it?” DUH, she already painted it. Shades of Chardin meet The Sopranos. It’s lifelike yet hollow. Look underneath the acid-green shelf. It’s all an illusion. This work is smart, funny and rich with pop culture and art historical references. It is a knockout.
My third day of studio visits, summer has finally hit New York City and my air conditioning is broke. The last two artists work and live outside the city so it’s just their work and me on my laptop. Dorene Quinn’s “Knot Restoration Project,” pun intended, made me laugh out loud. It is massive in scale, obviously took a hell of a long time to make and contains elements of the absurd. It’s very “crafty” and made with cheap construction materials. The piece has oodles of orifices (pussies and buttholes), knots that Quinn has recycled and painstakingly inlaid. All these holes seem to float and are a band-aid healing the wood, yet it’s heavy too. Groovy.
Yvonne Buchanan’s video “slippage” is like a Bridget Riley/Gerhard Richter painting come to life. As the moving (literally and figuratively) picture starts, multiple stripes of video that the artist has edited and put together begin to flash simultaneously across the screen, increasing and decreasing in number, conjuring up aloneness, loss and the force of time. I felt cleansed after viewing it but sad too. Spent. It is a living painting and it changed my world, if only for a minute, but hey, what more could you want from art?
It was fun to hang with the artists, go to the studios and look at their works and worlds. Collage? Maybe or maybe not, but all of the pieces oscillate wildly, bringing us to places of beauty, experience and experimentation—whether visually built-up or stripped away we are taken on a trip and made to perceive charged invisible places.
Brian Quirk is a playwright and actor and lives in Manhattan.
Copyright © 2009 by Brian Quirk
