ON VIEW
TLDR list and links below
You Can’t Hide The Sun, Ron Bechet and Hannah Chalew at Other Plans Gallery
It’s not every day that we come across large charcoal drawings. The scale and medium of Ron Bechet’s drawings encourage a physical response in the viewer. Charcoal is burnt material, and I think we respond to burnt material on a molecular level.
All the time, in our periphery, we see identifiable trash merging with decomposition. We look away. Without the usual context–trash piles, gutters–we look longer. This is the experience offered in the sculptures of Hannah Chalaw. My thought-path lead me to mortality and the decomposition of the body… (the very word “decomposition” but you don’t have to go there.
The work in thistwo person show did what work in 2-person show is supposed to do: resinate, distinguish.
Dirk Staschke, Impressions, at Ferrara Showman Gallery
What am I even looking at? I love this reaction when I have it. Standing in front of Dirk Staschke’s 2-slash-3D sculptural wall ceramic mashups trigger associations from Dutch still life to 1970s brochure aesthetic, and also Rococo. Decorative, dark, humorous and concise. What’s there and what’s not there. I felt the strangeness of the tradition and practice of looking at art on the wall. I spent a long time looking at this work and could’ve stayed longer but Jon was waiting outside.
A drawing by John Alexander at Arthur Rogers Gallery
Sometimes you look at an artist’s drawings and think, this person really likes to draw. Small. Like a B-side or warm-up band, sometimes small drawings are the “it.” As artists, we are often nudged this way and that in a way the cave artists weren’t. As if big oil paintings are necessarily superior to small drawings in graphite. Since forever, artists have been given guidelines, created by patrons, markets, or other external forces. Sometimes this nudge is away from the artist’s most authentic impulse.
People like big paintings. I ain’t (necessarily) goin’ out like that. This small drawing of a monkey was, for me, the best work in this show and one of the most authentic things I’ve seen this week.
The (nostalgic) Bobby Huckaby Drawings by Douglas Bourgeois at Arthur Roger Gallery
I stood in front of Douglas Bourgeois’ Bobby Huckaby drawings trying to figure out how faces, rendered a certain way, can reference a specific era or eras in culture. I landed on the drawn line that separates the lower lid from the eyeball. This line has come and gone from the rendering of faces throughout the history of humans depicting faces. (In high school I was taught not to emphasize it (toward a certain “realism”).
These part-shaded, part-delineated faces reminded maybe in combination with the marbled, luminous effect of the acrylic wash behind the graphite, maybe the stylized patterns reminded me of the Steeplechase face of Coney Island and Asbury Park. What makes nostalgia look like nostalgia?
(They also reminded me of the collaged drawings of David Depuis)
Small Ceramic Lalibela Church by Horton Humble at the artist’s studio
This small ceramic piece was the monkey drawing of my visit to Horton Humble’s studio a few weeks ago. It stuck with me and like the Jar in Tennessee, the room seemed to revolve around it. I was also reminded of the Fisher-Price buildings I played with as a child, wanting to shrink and go inside.
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You Can’t Hide The Sun, Ron Bechet and Hannah Chalew at Other Plans Gallery
Dirk Staschke, Impressions, at Ferrara Showman Gallery
A drawing by John Alexander and the (nostalgic) Bobby Huckaby Drawings by Douglas Bourgeois at Arthur Rogers Gallery
Small Ceramic Lalibela Church by Horton Humble at the artist’s studio