Foundation at Gallery Boreas, Brooklyn
Shane McAdams
Obscure catchall titles are the glue that holds most summer group shows together. By the season’s end, one gets the impression that the conceptual centers of curators’ brains have grown weary and have opted to rely on their rhetorical powers to pick up the slack.
Foundation, a group show curated by David Pierce at Gallery Boreas in Williamsburg, might be classified as a "catchall" title were it less accountable to its lofty claim. Indeed, foundations signify nothing if not all that’s broad, profound, and universally important. So, while the title of the show is commendably ambitious, it also shoulders a heavy burden of proof.
The entry point to the exhibition is a conceptually economical sculpture by Brooklyn artist, Mike Womack. With a clarity and restraint that is rare in contemporary art, the piece addresses the range of post-Kantian oppositions that have preoccupied the art world for the past century: the noumenal vs. phenomenal, the virtual vs. actual, and the concrete vs. abstract. On the base of a simple office chair that looks to have been lifted from the IRS thirty years ago sits a Carl Andre-esque cube of standard bricks. A simple line painting of the removed back/top of the chair bends around the faces of the cube. From the gallery’s entrance one sees a perfectly proportioned chair that is half actual and half illusion, whose perspectival accuracy changes with the viewer’s vantage. While the piece is rigorous and cerebral, the mass of bricks that hulks oppressively on top of the spindly chair legs invests the piece with a blue-collar poetry that trickles down from the head into the body.
David Shull broaches similar issues with a more plaintive and delicate touch. His Untitled is a loose and absurd dialogue between a drawn picture of a cube and a collapsed vinyl cube hanging on an adjacent hook like a skirt steak from a digital cow. Real volume is collapsed and illusionistic volume is manufactured, declaring a kind of reconciliation between the same dueling parties in Womack’s critique.
Sean Morello’s small works on canvas and paper also question issues of authenticity, illusion, and materiality as well but in the two dimensional realm. The work owes credence to self-reflexive investigators such as Richter, Paolini, and Niele Toroni, although the work doesn’t so much rely on the past as it uses it as a point of departure. A painting like Geometric Abstraction (Tide Clorox) with its neo-pop clarity and control could seem smug if it took the time to admire itself in the ontological, post-modern art mirror, but the work makes it point simply and moves on quickly.
There is a measured awareness in the work of this trio that, in their simultaneous disavowal and acceptance of history, seems to look longingly into art’s past but is primarily concerned more with the contemporary prioritizing and parsing of it.
Despite the danger of building so much momentum in a single, sober and analytical direction, the show stops on a dime and nimbly changes course.
Yasmin Etemadi’s Flag Camouflage, a photo installation, fills out the front room with a bit of necessary contrast. The piece works well on two different levels; it is symbolically strong as a collage of American flags either obscuring or depicting (however you want to look at it) a figure trying to emerge or recede (however you want to look at it.) Beyond this more humanistic achievement, the piece is optically arresting. It has a how-is-it-made curiosity factor that would give David Reed fans a gas. However, it succeeds primarily on its value as a metaphor for Etemadi’s own relationship to American culture as an Iranian woman. And, while the bar for thin and untransformed identity art gets higher and higher by the hour, Etemadi’s work hurdles it comfortably.
Shanghai based painter Zhu Wen Qing takes up Etemadi’s inquiry into national identity and takes it into the realm of language, evaluating its effectiveness as a tool for facilitating social progress. Like fellow Chinese artist, Xu Bing, Qing addresses the communicative failures of language across various social, cultural, and geographic boundaries. In The Mirror On the Wall Hangs High his message is paradoxically strengthened by being exhibited inside an American gallery where the viewers must consult translated documents for the meaning in his text-heavy paintings.
Flickering nearby, and impossible to ignore, is Scottish artist Peter Finnemore’s projection of a time-lapse video of a burning wood shack. Forest Fire is the most provocative and sensational piece in the show. There is helplessness generated by the video that speaks to the very modern condition of how one confronts on-screen violence; being disturbed and over-stimulated but too dislocated and emotionally paralyzed to react. The blazing shack also functions more directly as a symbol for the same weakening of structures and foundations addressed by Womack, Etemadi, as well as the other artists in the show.
Pierce’s foundation seems to get more and more solid as the show progresses. The show summarizes the erosion of certainty and emergence of multiple truths has come to characterize the contemporary landscape of ideas in the art world and beyond. While this is a task that cannot be accomplished with complete resolution, Pierce does an admirable job of broaching a cumbersome and broad subject with art rather than (a) word(s).
