Olu Oguibe, Saya Woolfalk and Cary Smith at Real Art Ways, Hartford, Connecticut

Would have been nice to hit the Creative Cocktail Hour this past Thursday, but the day job pretty much kicked me to the curb. So to make up for it I hit the openings tonight at Real Art Ways, a "three-fer" deal featuring Olu Oguibe, Saya Woolfalk and Cary Smith.

I'd wanted to see Cary Smith's paintings for a while now. The jpeg files online make them look ice cold, perfectly painted. By and large that's how they come off in real life. The paint is very thin, perhaps applied and wiped off or applied in very thin layers. Maybe in some cases it's applied in thin scumble or dry brush, hard to say. Their tracery of lines and shapes is robust, map-like. Perhaps the lines are made through masking, but too often it seemed like the colored paint surrounding the tracery flowed along with it, rather than being crossed by it. The sense I got was that the artist literally paints around the figures and leaves an underpainting of white exposed.

Regardless, the lines and shapes provide a super-flat architecture that supports a diagrammatic space of ambiguous depiction. There's a little bit of the sense that some meaning underlies it all, but for me this fades quickly. In the end I was left with an admiration for a very precise and finely-honed technique.

Smith's older paintings include shapes that I can only think of as slices of fruit, and there were a few examples of these at the RAW show. Here's one from the Feature Inc website that isn't at RAW:



These shapes and the lines noodling around them give me the distinct sense of kitchen decor. Imagine an overlay of text in 1950's-style lettering and you've got the makings for a snappy cookbook cover. Maybe the phallic loops are meant to charge these works with a kind of sexuality, but if that's the case the artist's frosty clinical precision would be cause for some serious shrinkage.

Smith's newer (newest?) works at RAW feature tree-like structures. Take a look at Splat #16:



Not sure if it's the sky blue along with inverted tree shape, but I'm reminded of Carroll Dunham's recent tree paintings. There's a marriage here of geometric and organic that suggests cybernetics, or perhaps a technology of artificially generated biological forms. The interplay of positive and negative shapes in these smaller paintings is more playful than in the older works.

After a pause at the awesome snack table -- and RAW knows how to lay out a spread, people -- I slipped over to a dark corner of the big gallery where a performance was taking place on a colorful black-light set of painted organic and geometric elements too numerous and varied to remember with any precision. It's like a sugary night-time haze in my memory, although tiny dots of green light projected on the ground and constantly moving stand out in my mind. The performer -- was this Saya Woolfalk herself? -- dressed in a kind of white body suit seemed to move through a series of drawn-out, carefully rehearsed movements that included prostrations and writhing. She remained in the same part of her stage the entire time I watched.

As she performed, a video played on a wall directly to the right of the stage area. The audio was perfectly terrible, playing through two crappy computer speakers left on top of the projector, roughly eight feet above our heads.

The combined effect of terrible audio, mildly interesting video, badly lit inscrutable performance and sugary-sweet stage set was the sense of being in a mall in which everyone was conscientiously engaged in pointless actions -- performer, viewers and nearby gallery visitors who weren't viewing the performance.

Woolfalk's hanging artworks were less baffling and perhaps a bit more coherent than the performance piece. They remind me a bit of paintings by Thomaselli and of contemporary folks paintings by artists whose names I can't remember right now.

A brightly lit gallery next door to the performance was hung with artworks that hadn't been created yet, dated 2011 or 2012 or something similar. These appeared as white rectangles on the sky-blue wall. Also some poor victim had been reduced to a skeleton and left on a table. Truth be told I have no idea what this part of the exhibition was about and couldn't be bothered to find out.

Olu Oguibe has apparently become infatuated with New England's stone walls. As the RAW website notes,

For me the stonewall in the gallery space is first and foremost a formal statement. It is a simple, three-dimensional line in space, a mark, if you will. It is also the ultimate minimalist gesture in the sense that the medium is not the stone but the wall itself, and my approach is to present the stonewall in its barest elemental essence, as a complete gesture, almost like a found object, without artifice.

Of course, like any other object, the New England stonewall is more than just a form in space. There is an amalgamation of geology, history, craft and metaphor inherent in the form that requires no greater intervention than to relocate the wall from nature to the gallery. In doing so, the goal is to transcend the philosophical limits set by other artists from Robert Smithson to Andy Goldsworthy, who have rearranged nature within nature in order to make art or a statement. Nature requires no such rearrangement.

I am interested in the New England stonewall as a conceptual marker, as metaphor; a metaphor for the conquest of the wild and the triumph of sedentary civilization; a metaphor for our democracy which was founded on labor, migration, individual determination, and communal vision; a metaphor for in-between spaces; a metaphor for a sense of place; a metaphor for New England itself.

By moving the New England stonewall into the gallery or museum space, and making the stonewall part of the vocabulary of conceptual art, I hope to generate a new, inclusive discourse that draws no line between aesthetic or formal concerns, and environmental, cultural, and social discourses.

Thing is, the wall Oguibe built at RAW has about as little to do with classic New England stone walls as it possibly could. I know stone walls, having tromped through the woods and farms of Northwest Connecticut for roughly eight years of my youth. They're rough-hewn, built of necessity as farmers cleared big rocks from the land. Over the years they tend to collapse through weather and abuse to resemble long piles of stones shot through with saplings and poison ivy. The stones themselves are often speckled with lichen.

Perfectly built walls similar to the one Oguibe built can be found in New England, to be sure, but they're built by anal-retentive stone masons hired by aristocrats to surround their mansions. These particular stone walls truly are triumphs of sedentary civilization, as the artist notes: the civilization of bankers and financial gurus responsible for the recent economic meltdown.

This massive wall is satire, a faithful reproduction of the great dividers the wealthy erect to provide a sense of separation from and elevation above the working class, who are hired and required to build them to right-angle perfection.

In the rather tedious accompanying video a number of doughy white people are allowed to spoof themselves by jabbering on and on about the cultural value they place on these property dividers built by people who work harder in a week than Wall Street aristocrats likely work in a year. Specific topics include efforts to preserve the walls, which come off as efforts to preserve the economically stratified status quo.

To tweak Oguibe's first paragraph above, the 'stonewall' really isn't a formal statement first and foremost, in the artist's mind; it's first and foremost a conceptual statement, the artist devouring the aristocracy's last sacred space, the public art space, with a conceptually-charged structure that aristocracy uses to separate itself from its surroundings.

And what a comic structure that is, because these walls can't really stop anything capable of scrambling over them. Hoards of angry investors and home owners still have free and unemcumbered access to the palaces of the financial elite.


REAL ART WAYS
56 Arbor St
Hartford, CT 06106
860.232.1006
email: info@realartways.org

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