"Underneath the Roof We Built from the Trees We Run Between"
By Marco Antonini
Exhibition view. Photo courtesy of Cinders gallery.
An installation by Kelie Bowman and Sto in Williamsburg’s Cinders Gallery, "Underneath the Roof We Built from the Trees We Run Between" is one of the best, if little, things I’ve seen recently. The cozy exhibition space of Cinders is resized by a "room inside the room" built specifically for this exhibit. Sto’s side of the room is filled with a large patchwork of painted scraps of wood, a damaged background for his lovely, rugs-and-cloth damaged creatures. Little and not-so-little living things sit, crawl, and spy on the viewer under the vigilant eye of the massive "Bullephant" (part Bull, part Elephant, wise beyond his years, seen by many as a king and just as many others as a real asshole–according to the wall list). This colorful, yet sad crew of outcasts finds temporary shelter and home in the wood scraps, waiting to be pulled out, chosen, adopted. The bittersweet presence of these funny creatures is mirrored in the drawings of Kelie Bowman’s side. Here, the resized room shows a much cleaner display. The walls are painted and decorated to incorporate little artworks on board or paper. A window allows us to peek "outside" into the snow (the white powder is generated by an actual fake-snow machine) and see a tree woman reaching towards the sky.
Many other little paintings tell stories of disappearance, reappearance and loss. The "disappearance" chapter is championed by the sinister work, and then they disappeared, a tiny but intense painting, apparently ageing like an instamatic camera picture. The little painting actually resembles a snapshot of a brownish valley. The hand-written title suggests we’re missing something important ("and then…") and locks the ground, the mountains and the sky in a perfect circle, resonant with loss and longing.
Other artworks strike different chords, with more or less irony, more or less vision, more or less depth. The wall paintings keep everything together, creating visual extensions between the single pieces and suggesting ever-changing narrative paths to the viewer. This small and unpretentious show is perfect for people who still want to see beauty and wit in small, unpretentious things.
