Maximum Art, the inaugural exhibition at International Curatorial Space curated by Lois Plehn, spans the gamut from minimalist works to recent developments in painting.
Maximum Art @ International Curatorial Space, Curated by Lois Plehn, 504 West 22 Street, NY
by Joyce B. Korotkin
Maximum Art, the inaugural exhibition at International Curatorial Space curated by Lois Plehn, spans the gamut from minimalist works to recent developments in painting. Unexpectedly humble materials transformed into cutting edge, highly refined art are the surprise here, such as Ed Baynard’s brilliantly colored glitter paintings, Marco Maggi’s silvery kitchen-quality tooled aluminum foil and Kori Newkirk’s glossy "pony" beads knotted into macramed basketball hoops.
Fusing spare sensibilities with those of a sort of contemporary neo-baroque, Ed Baynard takes painting to the farthest parameters of what it can be, referencing the entire canon of art history while leaning toward an aesthetic that might be termed "Asian Pop." With the simplest and most unlikely of means — glitter glue – Baynard draws intricate narratives on radiantly colored grounds, combined with over-the-top decorative patterns reminiscent of Persian miniatures. Emerald greens, deep rosy pinks, plums and dense cobalts are the intoxicating sets upon which Baynard’s theater of life is staged. Birds, bugs, frogs, coral and fish engage in the drama for survival in a world where danger lurks at every turn. Gossamer insects waft across the skies and into certain death as they head toward iridescent predators, frogs leap obliviously into the water to possible doom. The mythic terror and fragility of life feeding off of life affords the work a disconcerting edge, despite its dazzling beauty.
Marco Maggi’s "Sliding (A,B,C)" also veers out of its formal minimalist tradition into the realm of baroque. Tiny, intricate drawings in drypoint on aluminum foil recall everything from Braille and computer chips to pre-Columbian and post-Clintonian hieroglyphs; all forms of communication that can only be deciphered by the cultures to which they are addressed. The foil drawings are encased within cardboard mounts — the kind that artists use to mount their slides; these are then combined in larger gridded units within silver frames. Some mounts are left blank, allowing a play of light and shadow as well as a sense of 3-dimensionality into the piece that echoes the nature of the tooled foil itself. An interesting conceptual twist is inherent in this and in the materials Maggi uses; slides are traditionally transparencies one can look through to view and evaluate an artist’s work; here, the slides are opaque and become the work itself; while the spaces one can look through display nothing.
In "Plexi Line I (left & right)," Maggi reverts to a more pure formal approach. Here, elegantly spare but nearly invisible "drawings" that recall early Sol LeWitt are etched into the plexi that covers the frame. The etched lines cast a shadow drawing onto the otherwise empty matte within.
Kori Newkirk’s "Closely Guarded" is a departure from the pictorial beaded curtains for which he is known. Here, wall-mounted basketball hoops are hung with macramed nets of black synthetic braids into which pony beads (associated with African American hairstyles) are knotted. Unlike those of regulation basketball hoops, the nets are delicate, unable to support the rigor of the game, and they extend gracefully down and puddle onto the floor like elongated spiderwebs or "dreads." The braiding and beads, as well as the basketball metaphor itself, refer to stereotypical signifiers of African American culture and identity. Adjacent to the hoops is an inkjet diptych, "Bumper," from a photograph that crops in closely on painted floor goal markers. Its two broken halves visually unite via a curved line that jumps the interstice between prints.
Stephan Kurten’s wildly patterned paintings of domestic and urban scenes substitute architecture as a metaphor for human presence. "Adult Lullaby" uses geometric substrates to draw the viewer into the interior space of its verdant courtyard. Dense textures comprised of leaves, shadows and light dance across the image, embellishing it with a surface noise in counterpoint to the implied silence evoked by human absence. In "Every Day: Fine Wrinkles," architecture gives way and pattern takes precedence, leaning toward abstraction.
Also incorporating pattern, texture and decoration but to different ends are the miniatures of Shahzia Sikander. Sikander fuses Muslim and Hindu imagery to that of images drawn from contemporary western culture, addressing issues of the migrant’s struggle to maintain identity as well as the stereotyped views of immigrants. The notion of the hybrid as a displaced person belonging not to one culture but to many is symbolized by repeated motifs such as the veiled griffin in "Ready to Leave, Series II." Here, the griffin stands before a veiled woman; she and the griffin are surrounded by abstracted signs and symbols that reference western art movements.
Tracy Rose’s "Maque II" and "Bunny" are overscaled Lambda prints that explore identity, racial and sexual issues with imagery of a more violent nature. Saturated with rich colors and laden with striking details, these works are narratives frozen in mid-action."Bunny" is a particularly loaded image, with its masked, bunny-eared avenger who holds a rifle in delicately gloved hands. Erotic graffiti is on the wall behind her; a barbed wire fence is in front. A South African woman of color, she is made up in coarse white powder, with lips a smeary red, her face itself a mask beneath the mask. Her outfit recalls a Nun’s habit with white collar made of cut and pinned paper; and black dress made of a plastic garbage bag. "Maque II" is at first glance a breathtakingly romantic image of three diaphanous angels carrying cakes, hovering in the luminous sky over Florence. A closer inspection reveals that the apparitions are the same made-up character as in "Bunny;" the cakes are cleaved by butcher’s knives, and the scene below appears to be a triple-exposed view of tract houses piled on one another.
Jim Campbell harnesses time, motion and stasis in an evocatively silent electronic sculpture that is curiously poetic. In "Motion in Rest #3," the shadowy, silhouetted image of a man walks slowly and endlessly – as if into eternity – across a subtly changing glowing red L.E.D. screen. Real and yet noncorporeal, he is a shadow walking into light who occasionally stops to sit, only to begin the endless trek all over again. The work’s melancholy psychological interior space is heightened through repetition as well as through the slowed motion, darkened gallery room and warmly beckoning light from the screen. The repetitive walk is hypnotic and one becomes transfixed. A contemporary myth, the shadow’s journey to nowhere recalls both the ancient Greek Sisyphus, doomed to push the same boulder up a hill, and Beckett’s "Waiting for Godot," who never arrives.
Although this exhibition is comprised of works that at first might seem to have no connection to each other, a commonality can be found in the sensually appealing materials, in the artists’ enlistment of decorative patterns and riotous color, in the emphasis on identity and survival, and in the curator’s acute eye for the subtle interplay between intersecting lines, nets and webs that weave it all into a cohesive whole.
