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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Book Review: Richard Wright Published by Rizzoli and Gagosian Gallery

The night shift: coffee nuked into sludge, East Village Radio humming low and crazy, three large paintings trilling demented dirges on the surrounding walls. Fresh mix of napthol brilliant red filling a three-ounce cup, burning through the 20th-hour haze.

Had the light not changed the tiniest bit, or had I missed the merest flicker of shadowed halogen, I'd never have noticed the hank of piano wire slipping over my throat, the gloved hand, the gray-coated lurch barely brushing my back.

Instinctively I tossed the paint over my shoulder at the intruder while seizing the razor-sharp noose with my other hand. I turned to see a gleaming red grimace of rage, napthol running down the corneas of his beady eyes.

The wire went slack for just a moment and I jerked away, but not far enough. A gloved fist hammered my solar plexus, doubling me down face-first into an up-jerked knee that whipped my head back into and through the flat white studio wall.

My chin hooked against a cross-beam and I nearly lifted my entire body off the floor struggling to pull my head from the ragged hole as the intruder grabbed my legs and gave a ferocious spine-straightening yank. Swarms of perfectly arranged dots danced in my eyes, reminding me of Untitled (22.09.05), as seen on page 31 of the nearest object my flailing hands could reach: Richard Wright, a book of artworks published by Rizzoli and Gagosian Gallery.

The neat white volume became a shield in my outstretched hands, blocking the merciless fists of my assailant and buying me precious milliseconds until my head popped free of the wall and I sprang away.

I'd only backed myself against a cabinet, but the sharp corners of the book became punishing daggars that jabbed savagely at my intruder's face and chest. He finally reeled into the gloom of an unlit corner, only to return with box cutters jammed in both fists. Arabesque slashes incised my white t-shirt and chest, creating twin scarlet blots spiked with scorpion-fish-like needles that eerily resembled the Richard Wright cover, which the book strangely fails to name in its List of Works.

The rampaging murderer reared back and paused to admire the strange mirrorlike similitude between chest and book, and that's when I frisbeed the volume, shuriken-style, at his paint-splattered face. I can only wonder at the furor coursing through his fiendish veins that helped him duck that bullet-speed blade, which then whipped around like a boomerang and returned to my waiting hands.

By that time the blood spouting from my chest had painted a design of perfect paisleys not unlike Untitled 2007 as seen on page 38 of the fairly well-illustrated book-turned-weapon. I realized this after I'd tripped the killer to the floor, leaped onto his chest and began mashing that page into his twisted face. I'd pulled the book away briefly to check that his face paint had dried enough not to stain it.

In my blind rage I couldn't have seen the foot that snaked up from behind and hooked around my neck, and I had no time for surprise as with a single merciless yank the killer tore my head back into the hardwood floor. Somehow during my brief period of unconsciousness I remembered the essays by Russell Ferguson, Sarah Lowndes and John Lowden that gave me fresh insights into Richard Wright's environmental paintings. Correlations with Mondrian and illuminated manuscripts came to mind, as well as interpretations of the mysterious Rohrshach-like design that emblazoned the book's cover.

My puzzlement over the omission of this piece's title became a life preserver that dragged me back from the cold depths of unconsciousness to see the killer standing above me, preparing to sink my own solid steel Ginsu butcher knife into my chest. A triumphal gleam shone beneath the crimson paint peeling off his face as he reared back, blade in hand, the vision shocking me into a last-ditch roll of desperation that left a hair's breadth between spine and knife.

Now, if you were to ask me why I'd had that 220-volt electrical socket built into the floor all those years ago, I probably couldn't tell you. But what I can tell you is that as hot blue bolts surged up that silver blade and across the killer's body, dancing his limbs in a wicked smoking twitching tarantella, I was grateful to see one of my more interesting art books, the one that probably saved my life, lying safely to the side beneath the flickering lights, far away from the sparks and flames that would ultimately require two and a half fire extinguishers to subdue.

"Downtown we call this guy 'the Studio Slayer,'" the detective intoned, wincing at the charred remains. "Obsessed with butchering artists whose taste in art books is highly refined. Guess you put a stop to this mad man's career once and for all."

"Well, I must admit I had a little help," I replied with a smile, dusting off Richard Wright one last time before slipping it back onto the second shelf of my studio book case.

Richard Wright earns three-and-a-half out of five broken home security systems for being fairly well illustrated, and for being somewhat handicapped by the inherent difficulty of translating environmental experiences into book format.

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Nancy Winship Milliken: Pleiades Amherst, MA through November 6, 2010

From the artist's website:

The object of my desire is the New England landscape, from the full sails decorating the waters of Provincetown to grazing sheep dotting pastoral Vermont hillsides. My heart sails over the rolling hills, beautiful fields and quiet bays of the Pioneer Valley near my studio. These wool felted sculptures grazing on a farm creates a landscape painting that one can walk into and feel the texture and smell of New England. The name of this show, Pleiades, refers to the seven stars in the constellation Taurus, by which sailors of old navigated, as well as the seven peaks of the Holyoke range. The process of felting not only filled my studio with the comforting smell of lanolin, it also mirrored the steady dailiness of farming. Likewise this installation, which requires vigilant maintenance against weather and time, honors the work traditions of water and land, especially the field on which it now sails.

Through November 6, 2010 -- Open viewing from the road. Group tours Sundays at 1:00. Private tours available by the artist.

Thistlebloom Farm
South East Street
Amherst, MA

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Book Review: Charles LeDray -- workworkworkworkworkpublished by Skira Rizzoli and the ICA Boston

Textile, the second flesh: an assiduousness to its weaving, the intensive laying-on of thread to thread that counts out instants of time while forming the material of an outer skin. The practical forms we create with textiles document human form, need, desire, modesty.

Charles LeDray's textile creations and installations echo these aspects of our lives in ways that are at times both amusing and profound. His pieces read like remnants of lives imagined yet not lived, shadows of fictive presences. In the case of his human bone pieces, authentic human remnants wrested and reconfigured toward aesthetic fictions.

Rizzoli and the ICA deal LeDray's ouvre a working class justice with Charles LeDray: workworkworkworkwork, a volume accompanying the ICA's touring survey of the same name. Large full-color photos pack most of its pages tightly and present the artist's work with all the clarity that's likely possible in a book this size (what, a bit less than 200 pages?).

LeDray's body of work boggles the mind in terms of obsessiveness, to be sure, but also in terms of sheer variety. Small hats, little suits, a miniature coat rack with a ratty, torn coat perfectly recreated at half-size, strange little remnants in frames, stuck to walls, installations of miniature clothing stores complete with drop-ceiling, tiny doll furniture carved of human bone -- the survey and the book could only present a sampling, but what a sampling it is.

A handful of essays at the front do a great job of introducing LeDray's work and setting it within a historical and contemporary context. In particular I enjoyed Adam D. Weinberg's inclusion of LeDray in a lineage that includes William Henry Fox Talbot, Eadweard Muybridge, Allan McCollum and Mel Bochner.

Charles LeDray: workworkworkworkwork earns four out of five miniature wizard hats for being a downright satisfying perusal and a terrific introduction to the work of this intriguing artist. And right now you can land it in your library for a song: a mere $27.50 at Amazon.

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