"Painting Expanded" at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery

Lauren Luloff, Yellow Window, 2011. Oil, bleached bed sheets, and fabric on muslin, 76 x 60 in., in "Painting Expanded," at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York, through July 29, 2011.

Tanya Bonakdar Gallery's summer show brings together work by 17 painters, most of them young and closely watched, for a group show called "Painting Expanded," which was curated by Renee Coppola, Phyllis Lally, Emily Ruotolo, and Scot Surdez.


Sam Moyer, Untitled, 2011. Ink and bleach on canvas mounted to wood panel, 60 x 48 in.

It's a largely black, white, and beige affair on Bonakdar's ground floor, where a quirky, tightly assembled wood construction by Donelle Woolford (the nom de plume of artist Joe Scalan) hangs near a mirror wrapped in Plexiglass by Justin Beal and a bright silver denim trapezoid by Anissa Mack. The much-discussed Jacob Kassay has a small diptych that spans the floor's staid spectrum: one of the panels is white, the other black, and neither one sports Kassay's trademark burns. According to the checklist, they're brushed with oil and silver deposits, and they show Kassay exploring that ultra minimal, almost-empty zone that he ventured into in the works in his recent Mitchell-Innes & Nash show with Virginia Overton and Robert Morris.


Jacob Kassay, Untitled, 2011. Oil on linen and silver deposit on canvas in two parts, overall installed dimensions: 12 x 24 in.


Hayley Tompkins, Knife, 2009. Found object, gouache, 9 1/4 x 3/4 x 2 in.


Ivin Ballen, 62 Diamond Street, 2011. Fiberglass, aquaresin, acrylic, gouache, 80 x 74 in.

The exhibition takes a flashier turn on the second floor, which harbors most of the more-colorful works. Alchemical processes seem to be at work in a few pieces, as in Ivin Ballen's enormous 62 Diamond Street (an address out in Greenpoint), which unites pulsating, nearly-three-dimensional bands of angular, patterned abstraction with faux duct tape delicately forged from fiberglass and aquaresin. Strange magic is also at work in Anna Betbeze's Slab, which looks from afar like a gloriously decomposing piece of sod that she's actually fashioned from wood, ash, acid dye, and watercolor.

Most of the artists will be familiar to those who have visited the galleries of the Lower East Side and the less-traveled sections of Chelsea over the past few years, but that's fine by me: summer can be as much a time for catching up with old favorites as discovering new ones.


Installation view of "Painting Expanded" on the first floor of Tanya Bonakdar.

"Control Alt Delete": A One-Night HKJB Show in Bushwick

Graham Collins in "Control Alt Delete," curated by HKJB, at 840 Broadway, 4th Floor, Brooklyn, New York, May 27, 2011. Photos: 16 Miles [more]

The official start of summer may still be three weeks away, but HKJB, the curatorial nom de guerre of artists Benjamin King and Jay Henderson, has already delivered what feels like the first show of the season: a one-night-only affair held last Friday on the fourth floor of 840 Broadway in Bushwick. It was, for one thing, gorgeously hot up there. My camera fogged up for a few moments as I tried to photograph the revelers, who were keeping cool with large, cold beers bought in the bodegas below. More to the point, though, the show, "Control Alt Delete" (a Windows reference from the art crowd!), had the raucous, anarchic spirit that we expect of the city's summer shows, with roughly fifty works by fifteen artists installed around the premises.


Matt Jones

A few participants had enough work on view to fill entire solo shows of their own, like Wayne Adams, whose trademark paintings of repeating chevrons were installed around the walls of the room. There were also two small ones leaning against a wall and an enormous one, ominously titled Ask Me No More Questions, Tell Me No More Lies, hanging off the side of a column. Matt Jones had a bounty on offer, too, mostly paintings that were propped up like sculptures and scattered around the floor. (Jones has already produced a book of photos of the show that he snapped with his iPhone; its available in a full-color or a thrifty black-and-white edition.)


Stacy Fisher

Though brutally outnumbered by the painters, the sculptors (or, at least, the sculpturally-minded) fared well. The California transplant Ernesto Burgos delivered on the promises of the work he showed at Kate Werble Gallery at the beginning of the year. His best piece (partially pictured below) was a curiously crumpled sculpture balanced against a wall that features an image of a hand proffering a stiff-looking cocktail. Yes, please! He also had two wall-hung constructions — one silver, one black, both sleek — that looked like immaculate, high-gloss seat cushions.


Left to right: Ernesto Burgos, Vince Contarino, Benjamin King

A new name for me: Graham Collins, whose painted slab of wood on top of a cinderblock (pictured at top) was a welcome moment of smart, quiet presentness, matched in that regard only by work of a trusty established name, Stacy Fisher, whose intimate black constructions held their ground impressively, tempting viewers to touch them.

With so much work placed on the floor and hung low on the walls, there were ample opportunities to admire the paint-splattered floors, the slow, steady work of Lauren Luloff and Tisch Abelow, who both use the space as their studio and had work in the show. Luloff offered a large painting (pictured below) with sections of bunched-up fabric — filled with white-on-dark-green leaves and snakeskin prints of umber, amber, and ocher — that abutted a swath of flowing, potable abstraction, all smooth grays and tans that almost tilted into peach. It looks like two or three or maybe four pieces seamlessly spliced into a single work, a multitude of divergent ideas operating in unison — not a bad metaphor for any successful group show.


Lauren Luloff


Top row: Ernesto Burgos, two paintings by Halsey Hathaway; middle: Wayne Adams, Ernesto Burgos, Wayne Adams; floor: Matt Jones


Matt Jones


Tisch Abelow


Floor left: partial view of Brion Nuda Rosch; center: Maria Walker; right: Wayne Adams




Lauren Luloff


Lauren Luloff


Lauren Luloff in the stairwell

Excepting the paint-bedecked floors, the joyous heat, and the strange indoor garden, the best part of the temporary, makeshift gallery may have been that it was on the fourth floor, meaning that twice — coming and going — visitors received a bonus show in the form of stairwells lined with art, mostly large canvases holding their walls against the streams of people visiting friends and eying their latest work.


The stairwell of 840 Broadway

Previously: HKJB's first show, "Personal Abstraction," held in May 2009, out in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, with the likes of Jim Lee, Wendy White, and Chris Martin.

"NOT THE WAY YOU REMEMBERED" at the Queens Museum of Art

Installation view of "NOT THE WAY YOU REMEMBERED," curated by Jamillah James, at the Queens Museum of Art, Queens, New York. Photos: 16 Miles [more]

When you next visit the Queens Museum of Art, head straight to the second floor. If you have some time to spare, take the ramp that steadily rises up and around the Panorama of the City of New York, as I did on Sunday afternoon, arriving to find a reception filled with artists and their supporters enjoying a majestic aerial view of "NOT THE WAY YOU REMEMBERED," a 16-artist exhibition curated by QMA fellow Jamillah James on the first floor. Even without that crowd, it is a thrilling place to begin. You can spot one of Brendan Fowler's multi-frame works from up there, all fluorescent pink flowers and lush green leaves, and a shelf of Jean Shin's altered trophies. There are more mysterious works, too: an empty display case, a pedestal bearing a dirt–covered shirt, and a collage assembled with just a handful of clippings, all things you will immediately want to see up close.


Left to right: Jean Shin, Altered Trophies (Everyday Monuments), 2009. Altered trophies, painted and cast resin. Dave Murray, 85% of the Art I Made Turned into a Diamond. 0.29-carat diamond. Brendan Fowler, Fall 2009 (2 Screen Flower Print, Flowers on Walk With Andrea/Terry/Cindy 1, Flowers on Walk With Andrea/Terry/Cindy 2, Flowers in Terry/Cindy's Garden 1), 2009. Digital C-prints, silkscreen ink and enamel on paper, frames, and Plexiglas.


Brendan Fowler, Fall 2009 (2 Screen Flower Print, Flowers on Walk With Andrea/Terry/Cindy 1, Flowers on Walk With Andrea/Terry/Cindy 2, Flowers in Terry/Cindy's Garden 1), 2009. Digital C-prints, silkscreen ink and enamel on paper, frames, and Plexiglas.

A wall of photographs greets you down below, an installation of Jason Lazarus's Too Hard to Keep Archive (2010–), which consists of images that fit the work's title, donated by people in the process of purging. (This is an increasingly rare privilege, as whole lives are archived online, digital photos never quite going away.) There are photos of a woman with a black eye, people kissing, and landscapes. A whole wedding album sits high on a shelf. If, in Bas Jan Ader's I'm Too Sad to Tell You (1971), we watch the effects of private grief, we here see its myriad sources, though we're equally cut off from the details. Viewing these mute objects triggers our own associations, perhaps even our own pains, a process that recurs throughout the exhibition, which is filled with works that offer various glimpses of personal lives, though never complete confessions.


Installation view of Faten Kanaan, The Reader, 2011. Mixed media.


Detail view of Faten Kanaan, The Reader, 2011. Mixed media.


Zak Kitnick, The People Behind Our Products (Silver), 2009. Die-cut tin sheet, LDF, and other media.



That admixture of display and reticence is also present in Zak Kitnick's The People Behind Our Products (Silver), a row of three wall-hung white boxes, each fit with an aluminum radiator cover, which shields and obscures different types of product packaging, castoff material that takes on a sinister, eerie presence when blocked by the die-cut metal. Lauren Luloff's Striped also looks similarly uncomfortable and vaguely elegaic in this context. A red, white, and blue striped sheet wrapped messily around a green board, it is propped against a wall like an abject, abandoned record of a domestic dispute, some unknowable trauma. Luloff also has a piece on view at the Bronx River Art Center right now, a frame strung with wild bands of colored fabric: it is a raucous party, and this is the brutal morning after. Such fanciful readings aside, it is also a visual treat, a Buren come unhinged and folded in on itself. When I first read the checklist, I thought its title was Stripped. That would fit too.


Lauren Luloff, Striped, 2010. Bed sheet, acrylic, rabbit skin glue, and wood.


Bryan Zanisnik, video stills from Preserve, 2009. Two-channel video, 5 min., 15 sec.


Taylor Baldwin, Martyr Me a Little, 2008. Extinct heart pine¹, white high-density polyethylene², yellow HDPE³, black HDPE⁴, drywall screws⁵, fluorescent green acrylic⁶, fluorescent pink acrylic⁷, epoxy resin⁸, black resin dye⁹, aluminum¹⁰, brass screws¹¹, paint mixing stick¹², sticky wax¹³, graphite and colored pencil¹⁴ on newsprint¹⁵.


Wall label and footnotes for Taylor Baldwin, Martyr Me a Little, 2008.

Taylor Baldwin opts for extreme disclosure, or at least the appearance of it, in the wall placard that accompanies his intricate and finely polished assemblage Martyr Me a Little (2008). It lists, in a lengthy series of footnotes, the provenance for each of the materials he used to build the work. The black resin dye? "Bought from Woodcraft for too much money and felt guilty over." Those brass screws? " "Salvaged from the VDOT warehouse liquidation." The accumulated series becomes a kind of contemporary update of Richard Serra's Verb List Compilation (1967–68), with acquisition methods — given, retrieved, donated, traded, bought, found, bartered, swiped, salvaged, made from, stolen, borrowed — replacing actions. Of course, that surplus of information says nothing about the content of the skull–adorned monument. We are once again only given a sliver of a reveal.


Agathe Snow, Paper General, 2007. Mixed media assemblage.

The empty box you spotted from up above turns out to actually contain one tiny object when you inspect it more closely: a minute diamond forged from the cremated remains of Dave Murray's art. Its title is 85% of the Art I Made Turned into a Diamond, and it has the unique glory of twisting John Baldessari's famous cremation episode into something new, witty (it weighs in at a modest 0.29 carats), absurd (why only 85% of his work?), and laced with ambiguity (why do this at all?). Agathe Snow takes a more impersonal route, scavenging castoff materials from downtown Manhattan for her sculpture Paper General (2007), a slick black collared shirt and white paint mask caked with thick mud. Divorced from their original owners and combined in this new context, these objects become non-sites for Snow's neighborhood and free-floating signifiers for our own thoughts, our own memories.


Installation view of "NOT THE WAY YOU REMEMBERED"

On first reading, the title "NOT THE WAY YOU REMEMBERED" suggested to me the surprise one feels upon returning to a once-familiar place or being confronted by a once-familiar object: "That is not the way I remembered it being." But it could also denote a shift in the process of remembering, a rewiring of the way we process or access memory, a Barthesian prick, or even a loss of control: "I didn't want to remember that, I don't like to think about those things." There is that strange, spare collage still to see — a work by Amanda Ross-Ho, it turns out. She's affixed to a rectangle of Sheetrock a snapshot from Woody Allen's Stardust Memories, a photo of a wildly colored pillow, and a section of a page sliced from a party-supply catalogue. There is also a lone earring. What will you make of this?

"The Working Title" at the Bronx River Art Center

Left: Keltie Ferris, Untitled, 2010. Oil, spraypaint on canvas, 36 x 24 in.; center, top to bottom: Joshua Abelow, Self-Portrait, 2010. Oil on burlap, 12 x 9 in.; Halsey Hathaway, Untitled, 2010. Spray paint on dyed canvas, 26 x 21 in. "The Working Title," Bronx River Art Center, Bronx, New York, March 25, 2011. Photos: 16 Miles [more]

"If history is a record, the art of today locates itself in its scratched and skipping grooves."
— John Kelsey, "Unclaimed Bags Will Be Destroyed," originally published in Uncertain States of America, Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo, 2005

Let's drop in the word art as the second word in Kelsey's sentence and talk about abstraction, specifically a sizable group show called "The Working Title," on view now at the Bronx River Art Center's temporary home that is resolutely focused on contemporary examples of it. (The center's permanent space in West Farms is undergoing a much-deserved, and impressively well budgeted, $7-million renovation.)


Installation view


Inna Babaeva, More Than You Think, 2011. Softwood lumber, PVC clear sheets, casters, 64 x 90 x 40 in.


Kris Chatterson, Untitled, 2011. Acrylic, UV inkjet on polyester over panel, 40 x 30 in.

Organized by Progress Report, the curatorial nom de guerre of artists Kris Chatterson and Vince Contarino, the exhibition includes 32 artists whose interests tilt toward the extroverted, ebullient (though not necessarily emotionally expressive) end of the available abstract spectrum, of the historical record to be sampled and sliced apart. There is, for instance, an effervescent Keltie Ferris canvas, its eerie black ground bedecked with primary-color polka dots, a madcap Mondrian. A small square by Matt Deleget — titled Shuffle (for Grandmaster Flash), a tribute to the hip-hop legend who grew up in the surrounding community — contains far more punch than one would expect from a painting just 18 inches on each side. Filled with bright squares of pink, yellow, and orange, it holds up well against its sprightly neighbor, a Cordy Ryman put together with just a few wood blocks.


Left to right: Cordy Ryman, Vector, 2010. Enamel, shellac and epoxy on wood, 36.25 x 33.5 in.; Matthew Deleget, Shuffle (for Grandmaster Flash), 2011. Acrylic, fluorescent and metallic acrylic on MDF, 18 x 18 in.

It's a strange thing be in the neighborhood of Grandmaster Flash, just a few blocks from the late and legendary Fashion Moda, looking at contemporary art by artists whose work one usually sees in Chelsea, on the Lower East Side, or out in Brooklyn. Strange, but nice, with friends and acquaintances brought together en masse in a new context. Perhaps you have seen Joy Curtis's architecture–bewitched show at the Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery, open through Sunday, and want more. You will find it here, a sculpture of what look like roughly splintered white wall moldings that have been strung them together and hung from the ceiling. Two of her gallery compatriots are here too, Ian Pedigo, a maker of inscrutable assemblages and arrangements, and Pamela Jorden, who produces deceptively simple abstractions, patches of color that threaten to cohere but never quite do.


Joy Curtis, St. Virga, 2010. Hydrocal, fiberglass, wood and metal, 98 x 21 x 21 in.


Tisch Abelow, Untitled (very tizdayle), 2009. Gouache on paper, 68 x 82 in.

Joshua Abelow, who closed out a winning show at James Fuentes in February, is another welcome guest, represented by a tiny and typically witty painting called Self Portrait — the promise of its title fulfilled by just two circles and a single line against a geometric background. His sister, Tisch Abelow, has work on display as well, an enormous painting that looks like — and very well could be — a magnified detail of a James Siena, triangles folding in on each other. Lauren Luloff's piece is comparably mysterious, harder to classify. A wood rectangle covered with a web of translucent fabrics and strings, it's balanced precariously on the top of a low drywall. Its unwieldy, almost-organic masses of material look prepared to crawl out into the room, perhaps to join together with Inna Babaeva's More Than You Think, a series of wood frames on wheels that she has wrapped in streams of neon fabric.


Dennis Hollingsworth, Todo es Igual, 2011. Oil on canvas, over panel, 32 x 24 in.; Gary Petersen, Step Up, 2011. Acrylic on panel, 20 x 16 in.


Ian Pedigo, Untitled, 2010. 76 x 60 x 30 in.


Top to bottom: Osamu Kobayashi, Eternal Gathering, 2010. Oil on linen, 14 x 17.5 in.; Tamara Zahaykevich, glowing teef, 2009. Foam board, paper, acrylic paint, watercolor, ink and glue, 2.375 x 2.25 x 2.875 in.; Douglas Melini, Fluent Green, 2011. Acrylic on canvas with hand painted frame, 23.5 x 19.5 in


The crowd on opening night, Friday, March 25, 2011


Lauren Luloff, Buoy Gallery Installation, 2010. Mixed media, dimensions variable.


Center: Letha Wilson, Double Dip, 2009. Wood, digital prints, 80 x 5 x 38 in.; right: Patrick Brennan, The Mountauk Discussion, 2010. Materials, 24 x 18 in.

Picking definite favorites, clear winners, in a show with this many artworks is, of course, a fool's game, but here's one pick: Letha Wilson's Double Dip. She's gently bent two thin strips of wood — one large, one small — into gently curving loops and lined their interior faces with photos of lush greenery. A forest grows inside of them. I want to see one hanging next to a Robert Morris felt piece. If anything in "The Working Title" ages as well as those felts, if anything is being discussed 30 years from now, it will mean that quite a few of these pieces will have survived and won. People just may one day look at the checklist listing these fairly young, fairly brash abstract artists and marvel that all of their private languages were once chattering away together in a space in the Bronx, lobbying for their causes, fighting it out. Right now, it feels like a whole — albeit loosely knit — movement is up for a vote.


The front of 305 East 140th Street, #1A, in the Bronx, the present home of the Bronx River Art Center, but just for a bit.