Use the form on the right to contact us.
You can edit the text in this area, and change where the contact form on the right submits to, by entering edit mode using the modes on the bottom right.
123 Street Avenue, City Town, 99999
(123) 555-6789
email@address.com
You can set your address, phone number, email and site description in the settings tab.
Link to read me page with more information.
Davis’ work Reticulated Tale is displayed on NYC bus shelters in anticipation of The Art Show (ADAA) 2023.
Dates & Locations:
October 4 - November 5
10th Ave. @ 23/24th St.
October 16 - November 5
10th Ave @19/20th St.
72nd St @Park/Lexington Ave.
Upper East Meets Lower East in a Celebration of Art in Manhattan
October 19, 2023
By Alina Tugend
In one of the more surprising turns in his life, Toddrick Brockington, a felon for 26 years and now head of a mentoring program, will attend a gala where his portrait will be a major attraction.
The oil painting is part of the Art Show held by the nonprofit Art Dealers Association of America (ADAA) at the prestigious Park Avenue Armory on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. The show has been held for 35 years to raise money for the 130-year-old Henry Street Settlement, a community services organization for residents of the city’s Lower East Side.
The show, running Nov. 2-5, has always had an unusual uptown-downtown relationship, linking the increasingly unequal worlds within New York and in the country as a whole. This year the connection between the two worlds is underscored more than usual with paintings by Kate Capshaw, a former actress, who painted the portrait of Mr. Brockington.
A selection of 20 oil paintings in her series Unaccompanied — large portraits of young people experiencing homelessness — will also be shown at the Dale Jones Burch Neighborhood Center, a former fire station that is now part of the Henry Street Settlement. That show runs from Oct. 31 to Nov. 19.
This is the first time the Art Show has linked to an exhibition downtown; it will be free to the public, meaning “the community can connect and be part of it,” said David Garza, the president and chief executive of Henry Street Settlement.
Ms. Capshaw’s painting of Mr. Brockington will appear uptown at the Armory. The downtown show will include a painting by Ms. Capshaw of three brothers in Mr. Brockington’s program, which focuses on guiding and supporting boys and young men who are vulnerable and at risk of getting caught up in the criminal justice system.
The ADAA is a membership organization of about 200 fine art galleries nationwide. Henry Street Settlement serves about 50,000 people each year, half through its visual and performing arts classes free to those in public housing and half through its social services helping the unhoused, the unemployed, those needing help to feed themselves and their families and those struggling with mental health issues.
The relationship between the two institutions means that “while being a beacon of the glamour aspect of the city, it can help the real people of the city,” said Lisa Corinne Davis, one of the artists whose work will be exhibited at the Armory.
The amount raised by the Art Show for the Henry Street Settlement — about $1 million annually through its gala benefit and ticket proceeds — is the organization’s largest donation of discretionary money, giving it the ability to respond to crises as they occur, such as the pandemic or asylum seekers, Mr. Garza said. Most of Henry Street Settlement’s funding comes from government agencies, earmarked for specific programs.
Ms. Capshaw, 69, who has been painting for about 15 years, started creating portraits in 2016 of homeless youth and those living on the edge in Los Angeles. Since then, she has traveled to other cities to paint young people as part of the series.
Each painting, 64 inches by 44 inches, portrays the subject staring directly at the viewer at eye level, mostly unsmiling, against a black background representing a lack of refuge.
“I think the night is when you really realize that you haven’t a shelter,” Ms. Capshaw said.
In 2019, three of the paintings were selected as finalists in the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery’s juried show, the Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition, and were shown on a national tour.
Ms. Capshaw does not sell her work, but all the other pieces from the 78 galleries represented at the show will be on sale, priced from about $10,000 to $5 million, said Maureen Bray, the ADAA’s executive director. Tickets to the Art Show are $20 until Oct. 25, then $30. Students are half-price at the door and children under 12 are free.
Every ADAA member is invited to submit a proposal to the fair; half of those displayed are selected by all those members who submitted proposals and half by the Art Show committee, which is made up of members, Ms. Bray said.
Jameson Green, 31, an up-and-coming artist from Hudson, N.Y., was one of those chosen for the first time. His work, nightmarishly cartoonish and filled with symbols of the nation’s violent past — such as nooses — brings to mind the work of the cartoonist Robert Crumb and is also influenced by the German artist Max Beckmann.
One of his recent shows in Brussels was called “Mud Made Monsters,” a phrase from a song by one of his favorite rappers, Pusha T. “The characters in those paintings were very much going through their own trials, tribulations and developing as people and, in a lot of cases, some of the darker elements took the forefront,” Mr. Green said.
His creatures represent Mr. Green’s philosophy that “even in the best of us, we have the sides to us that are undeniably destructive. And they really can get out of hand if we don’t keep them in check.”
There is darkness, but also wit. A sign in one his paintings reads, “Colored Only,” but the world “Colored” is crossed out and replaced with POC.
“We relabel something with the idea of thinking that label will make things better,” he said. “However, the path still comes with its challenges that are unique to the people who are experiencing it.”
“Plausible Ploy” (2023), by the artist Lisa Corinne Davis, who will be showing eight paintings at the Art Show.Credit...via the artist and Jenkins Johnson Gallery
Ms. Davis, 65, a Brooklyn-based artist, is also a first-time exhibitor at the Art show, but a longtime attendee.
Her art, which is part of a number of private and public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, the J. Paul Getty Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, takes issue with the modernist notion of the grid, which “stood for universality, for oneness,” she said.
“As an African American woman of light skin who went to a Quaker school and grew up in an Orthodox Jewish neighborhood, I don’t understand that notion of oneness. So I’ve always been tweaking with the idea of unity,” she said.
One way is to distort the grids, which are what the eight colorful paintings that she is showing in the Art Show do. They seem to lead the viewer in one direction, then veer off into another one.
People are always trying to find patterns in things and people, and too often, “those patterns are faulty — they don’t tell you the truth,” Ms. Davis said.
That thought leads back to Mr. Brockington, whose 53 years of life have taken many shapes and paths. He served 26 years in prison for homicide. Released in 2017, he often dropped by Henry Street Settlement’s Jobs Plus program looking for employment.
Then one day his employment counselor told him the Henry Street Settlement had received funds to create a position called “credible messenger,” mentoring and inspiring young people. Mr. Brockington created the Mentoring and Nurturing (MAN) program about five years ago from his own lived experience.
The idea of being an invited guest at a gala where his portrait will be shown is one path he certainly did not expect. But he is more than good with it.
“One of the great things is knowing this portrait will be around long after I’m gone,” Mr. Brockington said. “If one person asks, ‘who is this person?’ and my story is told, it might ignite the same fire I had within me to just go out and help people.”
At the Galleries
Summer 2023
By Karen Wilkin
Attention to Artificial Intelligence and NFTs notwithstanding, the past season was dominated not by computer generated effects, but by paintings. Wide-ranging exhibitions bore vivid witness to the persistence and health of work made by hand by passionately committed individuals. Some of the most compelling shows were by noteworthy artists working today, including James Little (a star of the most recent Whitney Biennial), Lisa Corinne Davis, John Walker, and Julian Hatton, plus an unexpected, illuminating pairing of Rackstraw Downes and Stanley Lewis, but we also were offered work by less frequently exhibited painters from the recent past, such as the Italian-born Horacio Torres (1924–1976) and the American Bob Thompson (1937–1966), as well as, from an earlier generation, the Russian-born, Paris-based Serge Charchoune (1888–1975). And if anyone felt that the possibilities of twenty-first-century technology had been ignored, a large survey of Frank Stella’s studies and maquettes presented ample evidence of how contemporary materials and experimental techniques could be put into the service of high aesthetic ideals.
Lisa Corinne Davis has written extensively about her use of abstraction to create metaphors for what she describes as her highly individual experience as “a light-skinned Black woman who grew up in an Orthodox Jewish neighborhood.” In an illuminating essay, “Towards a more fluid definition of Blackness,” published in the online magazine Artcritical, she wrote, “Many African-American artists feel the obligation to represent Blackness. My position as an abstract painter allows me to manifest my own sense of self—my black self—as an expression of selfdetermination and freedom, while avoiding an oppositional stance.” She has been a painter to reckon with for years, but her most recent exhibition “Lisa Corinne Davis: You Are Here?,” at Miles McEnery Gallery in Chelsea, included some of her most assured and accomplished works to date. As she has taught us to expect, her complex, layered compositions played subtle variations of wonky grids and networks against larger pathways and punctuating elements. Her unstable, all-over expanses pulse and shift, sometimes evoking aerial views and mapping, sometimes suggesting the intricacy of textiles or the complexities of nature. They keep us off balance, making us question our understanding of our relationship to what is before us, always demanding and rewarding close looking. In Davis’ recent works, the component elements seemed particularly generous and muscular, the rhythms notably assertive. Large and small incidents wrestled for preeminence, making it impossible to decide what was on top of what and insisting that we keep paying attention. At times, contemplating Davis’ networks of marks was like watching the active surface of the ocean, but each painting announced a fresh conception of structure. In Phantasmal Precept (2023), luscious pink stripes solidified into broad bands, locked into a jagged surround of green, turning a flotilla of delicately shaded rectangles into waving handkerchiefs. Against the warm peach “field” of the airy Episodic Precision (2023), tangled grids clenched and expanded, lightened or darkened, either corralled by larger gestures or generating them. And in the energetic pale yellow Beguiling Basis (2023), one of the most complex and sensuous of the canvases, overlapping nets at once spread across the entire canvas and seemed to capture a spattering of ample white ovals, themselves surrounded by nested loops of unpredictable color.
The sense of dislocation that Davis’ paintings evoke can be read as a powerful means of transmitting her awareness of the instabilities and inequities of our society to her viewers, even though it may be perceived only subliminally, wordlessly. But it can also be argued that Davis’ paintings are most memorable not for their social and political allusions, but rather for their unexpectedness and multivalence as paintings, their mesmerizing drawing, their often surprising color, their disarming rhythms, and more. Her works exist brilliantly on both levels.
*Excerpt from Wilkin, Karen, At the Galleries, The Hudson Review, Vol. LXXVI, No. 2, Summer 2023.
By Barbara A. MacAdam
Lisa Corinne Davis’s new paintings, created between 2022 and 2023, represent an evolution from her earlier works. Not a change in direction or an abrupt turn, but rather a development expressed in an extended, nuanced conversation with herself.
And the work comes off as fresh and exciting, albeit familiar to Davis viewers and consistent with her earlier paintings. It’s a delicate balance. What stands out is how honest and straightforward her art is, while built on layers of intersecting grids and lines, and colors and patterns with often contradictory rhythms. The layers expose bare compositional and emotional complexity while demonstrating Davis’s path not to resolution or conclusion but to a kind of realization. There is a distinct openness to her work, which Davis has said explores “race, culture, and history;” it is psychological and not political. In that way, the paintings are more emotional than declarative and remain determinedly open-ended and essentially borderless, even to the point of inconclusive edges that often look as if they might continue indefinitely.
Davis’s fluid but concise work is founded in her own intellectual and artistic intricacy, indirectly addressing both her roots and her art historical associations. From modernism to Abstract Expressionism to neo-geo, Pattern and Decoration to technographics and, of course, to her viewers and their readings of her work, her paintings are like mosaics, bringing to bear biography, design, statistics, fences, grids, and fractured geometries. She builds depth through layers of abstraction, letting us peer through each as if we were voyeurs. We feel like explorers when examining a painting like Episodic Precision (2023), directed, or perhaps misdirected, through avenues via a long, sharp, jagged blue highway.
In a 2021 interview in Bomb magazine, Davis told artist Leslie Wayne how confusing it was to be brought up in a white community. Her father died when she was four, and her mother raised her alone and sent her to a Quaker school. Her mother, who had a law degree and a PhD and lived to be 100 years old, strongly influenced Davis’s intellectual and analytic approach to art and life.
The painting Phantasmal Precept (2023) is a tricky creation, bringing to bear flashes of near-representation in the form of biomorphic black blobs sitting in or emerging from small white boats or set on flying carpets, presented as gestures atop frenzied patterns of intersecting lines floating above a sea of flat green. This work is the closest in the show to figurative allusion. Though Davis resists direct narrative, we could possibly read a poignant evocation of history and the current moment in her enigmatic black forms and uneven strokes. She offers potential bridges between past and present, between pattern and gesture, between mind and matter, all held together with a strong linear netting. The result is like an update of Escher perspectives. Topping the surface and softening the linear severity of the geometric patterning are floating solid-color shapes that might have been plucked from a synthetic Cubist still life or clouds in a skyscape.
Playful and speculative, her paintings contain a kind of mapping that leads to extended mental journeys for both herself and the viewer. There is a sense of landscape conveyed through color and line and, at the same time, a quality of contemporary expressionism evocative of an artist like Chaim Soutine, who himself bridged Expressionism and Abstract Expressionism. It’s almost as if Davis conceived a contemporary abstract outline for Soutine’s vertiginous paintings.
With titles like Phantasmagoric Rationale (2023) which we might construe as “Phantasmagoric irrationale,” and Episodic Precision (2023), which we might rephrase as “Intended imprecision,” Davis brings unstable words and puns into the mix, and in so doing, messes with our minds. One thinks of an experimental novel in which we can shuffle the pages and begin, at any point, an unplotted story that has no ending. Davis has long sought a comfortable spot in such a matrix, and in this body of work, she seems to have found one.
The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation offers fellowships to exceptional individuals in pursuit of scholarship in any field of knowledge and creation in any art form, under the freest possible conditions.
180 scientists, writers, scholars, and artists honored across 51 fields
(New York, NY) On April 7, 2022, the Board of Trustees of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation approved the awarding of Guggenheim Fellowships to a diverse group of 180 exceptional individuals. Chosen from a rigorous application and peer review process out of almost 2500 applicants, these successful applicants were appointed on the basis of prior achievement and exceptional promise. See the list of new Fellows here.
“Now that the past two years are hopefully behind all of us, it is a special joy to celebrate the Guggenheim Foundation’s new class of Fellows,” said Edward Hirsch, President of the Guggenheim Foundation and 1985 Fellow in Poetry. “This year marks the Foundation’s 97th annual Fellowship competition. Our long experience tells us what an impact these annual grants will have to change people’s lives. The work supported by the Foundation will aid in our collective effort to better understand the new world we’re in, where we’ve come from, and where we’re going. It is an honor for the Foundation to help the Fellows carry out their visionary work.”
In all, 51 scholarly disciplines and artistic fields, 81 different academic institutions, 31 states and the District of Columbia, and four Canadian provinces are represented in this year’s class of Fellows, who range in age from 33 to 75. Close to 60 Fellows have no full-time college or university affiliation. Many Fellows’ projects directly respond to issues like climate change, pandemics, Russia, feminism, identity, and racism.
Generous gifts from friends and previous Fellows have helped support this year’s Fellows.
The actor and director Robert De Niro has underwritten Mark Thomas Gibson’s Fellowship in Fine Arts in honor of his father, the painter Robert De Niro Sr., a 1968 Guggenheim Fellow. Gibson’s paintings, inspired by comics, provide commentary on American history and explore Black representation.
The Dorothy Tapper Goldman Foundation continues its support of the Fellowship in Constitutional Studies, awarded this year to Kimberly Yuracko of Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law. Yuracko is an expert in antidiscrimination law, currently focusing on Title IX and the athletic participation of transgender girls.
Wendy Belzberg and Strauss Zelnick have underwritten a Fellowship in General Nonfiction awarded to Thomas Chatterton Williams in honor of the writer Stacy Schiff, a Guggenheim Fellow and Foundation Trustee. Williams is a cultural critic and author whose 2019 memoir, Self-Portrait in Black and White: Family, Fatherhood, and Rethinking Race was a TIME Magazine “Must Read” book of the year.
Anthony Roberts has underwritten a Fellowship in Geography & Environmental Studies awarded to environmental scientist Elena Bennett of McGill University.
Park S. Nobel, a 1973 Guggenheim Fellow, has partially underwritten a Fellowship in Biology for John Wallingford, a developmental biologist from the University of Texas, Austin who studies the genetic development of embryos, with an emphasis on lethal birth defects.
Together, five Guggenheim Fellows have funded a Fellowship in Early Modern Studies: this year, its recipient is Valerie Kivelson. Kivelson is a professor at the University of Michigan, specializing in early modern Russian history.
An exceptionally generous bequest in 2019 from the estate of the great American novelist Philip Roth, a 1959 Guggenheim Fellow, provides partial support for a wide variety of writers.
Fellows in the creative arts are partially supported by the Joel Conarroe Fund, named for the former President of the Foundation who was a Guggenheim Fellow in 1977.
Cindy Sherman, a current Trustee of the Guggenheim Foundation who was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1983, said, “Becoming a Guggenheim Fellow offered me the time and space to focus solely on the work that was the most important to me. I was free to think and create in a way that opened myriad opportunities for me and my art. I know this years’ Fellows will experience this honor as the greatest gift, as I did.”
About the Guggenheim Foundation
Created and initially funded in 1925 by Senator Simon and Olga Guggenheim in memory of their son John Simon Guggenheim, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation has sought since its inception to “further the development of scholars and artists by assisting them to engage in research in any field of knowledge and creation in any of the arts, under the freest possible conditions.”
Since its establishment, the Foundation has granted nearly $400 million in Fellowships to over 18,000 individuals, among whom are more than 125 Nobel laureates, members of all the national academies, winners of the Pulitzer Prize, Fields Medal, Turing Award, Bancroft Prize, National Book Award, and other internationally recognized honors. The great range of fields of study is a unique characteristic of the Fellowship program.
The Foundation centers the talents and instincts of the Fellows, whose passions often have broad and immediate impact. For example, Zora Neale Hurston wrote Their Eyes Were Watching God in 1936 with the support of a Guggenheim Fellowship and dedicated it to the Foundation’s first president, Henry Allen Moe. Photographer Robert Frank’s seminal book, The Americans, was the product of a cross-country tour supported by two Guggenheim Fellowships. The accomplishments of other early Fellows like Jacob Lawrence, Rachel Carson, James Baldwin, Martha Graham, and Linus Pauling also demonstrate the strength of the Foundation’s core values and the power and impact of its approach.
The postmodern battle between abstraction and representation is an old canard, and yet it keeps persisting. We like categories. They make us feel safe, that is, when they include us. But categories are inherently divisive and can often serve no purpose other than to neatly package history, information, and ideas that are inherently messy. And the art world is messy.
Lisa Corinne Davis is an artist and a friend. She paints abstractions, though she has not always done so. She is a Black woman and a woman “d’un certain âge,” neither young and emerging nor a revered grande dame. She’s simply been working with determination for years and is finally having a well-deserved moment. Last year she received a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, a coveted Award in Art from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and was picked up by Jenkins Johnson Gallery in San Francisco. Her work was recently included in the exhibition Subliminal Horizons at Alexander Gray Associates alongside artists Huma Bhabha, Melvin Edwards, Glenn Ligon, Martin Puryear, and Tschabalala Self, among others. She is currently one of ten artists in the exhibition Point of Departure: Abstractions 1958–Present at the Sheldon Art Museum. We met in Tribeca in New York City on a warm Sunday afternoon and talked about her childhood, her work, and the remarkable turn of events in her career.
—Leslie Wayne
Leslie WayneLisa, I’ve known you long enough to know that you do not take this newfound success for granted. In fact, I’ve often noted with a bit of alarm your self-deprecation and sense of distrust in the system. Those aren’t uncommon feelings in today’s art world, but they also don’t come out of a vacuum, and with you I sense they spring from a deeper source, deriving perhaps from your childhood. Is that fair to say?
Lisa Corinne DavisWow, Leslie, that is such a good and complicated question. I guess I would begin by saying when you grow up Black in America, and particularly in a town like Baltimore, more South than North, you are always looking around, navigating spaces that you want to enter. The right to these spaces is not given, so you find ways to be accepted into them, and it is never clear what those perceptions are or how things have shifted to open a door. The art world is no different, and I would guess, as you said, that since I have been working for many years as a painter and a professor, I wonder what has caused this recent attention, this new space. I guess I cannot help but believe it is based on these mercurial perceptions and constructs created by others, because the reality of working in my studio has not changed.
Lisa Corinne Davis, Quizzical Quantum, 2021, oil on canvas, 40 × 30 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Jenkins Johnson Gallery.
LW Yes, I think we’ve all come to accept that the prevailing trends in the world of critical discourse and market desirability are more often than not determined by forces beyond our control, so we continue on our own paths and hope that one day they will converge.
LCD I’m not talking about how the art world functions with the market and trends, but how I understand perception on all fronts, including the art world, to be about spaces you occupy and those you don’t, and how ultimately the logic of how things fit comes from a certain point of view at a given time. This perception is constructed and understood as it relates to someone’s lived experience.
LW Aha. Yes, I understand you’re talking about a much more nuanced and personal point of view. But I do feel that the external systems that are beyond our control inform the views that we have of ourselves in the world and of others who perceive us and our work. But going back to your childhood for a minute.
LCD Yes, well, this all comes from my early childhood in Baltimore. My father died when I was four. My mother was a very accomplished woman; she realized her potential but could never afford to study brain surgery due to the years of education needed. She had a law degree and a PhD. Having been born in 1921, this was a stratospheric accomplishment for a woman.
LW And a Black woman no less. Amazing. I know she just died at the remarkable age of one hundred. You inherited some powerful genes! So, she raised you alone, and I remember you telling me that she sent you to a private, Quaker school. That had to be disorienting, living in an all-Black neighborhood and going to a virtually all-white school.
LCD Yes, there it was, and it is impossible in a few words to describe the complication of my lived space versus educational space; race as category versus race as perceived; provided privilege versus inherited privilege.
LW So complicated. I do see a direct relationship between this aspect of your early life and the complexity that resides in your paintings today. You often speak about your work as an attempt to throw one’s perceptions off by presenting systems of information, but systems that have been disrupted and destabilized. Are these disruptions built into their DNA as it were, or do they develop as you work through the paintings? In other words, how much of it is the result of the unconscious act of painting, and how much of it is determinative?
LCD There is a direct relationship to my early life. I believe perceptions are derived from one’s learned experience and context. Society has structures for simplifying this reality by having categories like Black and White. And visual communication has structures to control our understanding. Like when we see geometry, primary colors, or aerial views like a subway map. We understand this to be based on fact, delivering objective information. But if you would have traveled to the old Soviet Union, you would have been presented with a map using the same visual language, yet it would have been delivered with subjective untruths in order to keep travelers away from certain locales. In the context of Russia, one knew this. Here, you would never think that untruths are being dispensed in this form. I work with these codes of understanding and mix them up to present to the viewer a conundrum about the choices they make in understanding what is merely suggested in the work.
LW You’re talking about the primacy of direct experience: the map is not the place; it’s a sign. I think that what you are getting at is that information is malleable and perceptions are unique to the individual. These ideas are very abstract, and you’re using the language of abstraction to explore them, which is not easy. There’s a long history of Black abstraction, from artists like Alma Thomas to Jennie C. Jones, but it’s been a battle for them to have agency in the art world. Do you feel the moment changing for that?
LCD I love how you put this. I am talking about the primacy of direct experience over the collective, which I am not sure really exists. I have thought a lot about why abstraction has been such a combative space for African American painters going back to the Whitney show of 1971. It seems that curators then—and now—have wanted Black artists to speak directly to the condition, to narrate politics. The idea that Black artists could speak through more indirect means and more personal rather than broad social issues has not been granted by the galleries and museums. But I do feel that things are changing because society is becoming more accepting of the idea of an individual experience for marginalized people.
LW Yes, we are in a watershed moment. It seems like there is a greater hunger to know more—to read what has been left out of history books and civics classes. Writers like Isabel Wilkerson and Ta-Nehisi Coates have done so much to fill that gap. But visual art is much more nebulous and expansive as a form than writing and film, which are so dominated by the narrative structure. You were not always an abstract painter. Why did you choose abstraction?
LCDI chose abstraction because my work is not political, it’s personal. My desire to explore and understand my Black self lives in a visceral, tactile, metaphysical, and psychological place. These sensibilities are abstract ones, and I felt I could better express them through abstraction rather than representation, which by its very nature is not fixed and allows for more open and fluid interpretations.
Lisa Corinne Davis’s work is on view in the Point of Departure: Abstractions 1958–Present group exhibition at the Sheldon Art Museum in Lincoln, Nebraska, until December 31.
Leslie Wayne is an artist and occasional writer and curator. She lives and works in New York City and is represented by Jack Shainman Gallery.
The Hudson Review, Winter Issue 2021
https://hudsonreview.com/2021/02/at-the-galleries-41/#.YB3WUpNKjvW
…Yet another approach to relevant subject matter could be seen Upstate, at Pamela Salisbury Gallery, in Hudson, N.Y., where the accomplished, disconcerting abstractions in “Lisa Corinne Davis: All Shook Up” explored, we learned, “themes of racial, social, and psychological identity.” Some years ago, in an essay, “Towards a more fluid definition of Blackness,” published in the online magazine artcritical, Davis wrote, “Many African-American artists feel the obligation to represent Blackness. My position as an abstract painter allows me to manifest my own sense of self—my black self—as an expression of self-determination and freedom, while avoiding an oppositional stance.” Self-determined and free as Davis obviously is, as an admired artist with a distinguished career, represented in significant public and private collections, currently Head of Painting at Hunter College, her paintings seem to be about contingency (among other things), which could be read as a distillation of the instability of perception and the inequalities of the society we live in. Or not. Whatever motivation we assigned to them, her complex, layered abstractions in Hudson, made between 2017 and 2020, with their warped grids, luminous hues, and syncopated rhythms, kept us off-balance, provoking often contradictory associations, from the natural to the man-made, the ephemeral to the mechanical, the organic to the technological, all of it, perhaps, visual, wordless equivalents for how we see each other and how we see ourselves. Davis superimposes tangled, knotted, irregular grids of different kinds—delicate and coarse, angular and curvilinear, frayed and continuous, suave and staccato—punctuating them with nodes of more intense hues, now widely dispersed, now rhythmic, now dense. We shifted between seeing a pulsing whole and focusing—or trying to focus—on individual layers, then followed the irregular path suggested by the scattered solid fragments, always aware of how the grids, even the most geometric, refused to respond to the vertical and horizontal edges of the support. The result? Even more animation and invigorating tension. And, no matter what else the paintings triggered in us, we also capitulated to the seductive rhythms of the grids and patches, the sense of light, and the clear, fresh color.
In some works, such as Flitting Foundation, with its disjunctive lavender and green drawing, throbbing zones of pale blue, and implications of overlapping, the layers suggested fictive depths, as if we were staring into moving water, while the dramatic scale shifts in the vertiginous Illusive Index suggested the built environment, seen from a distance. The exhibition included large and small canvases and works on paper, all ringing changes on related themes. Whatever the size or material, they were unignorable and powerful. I was specially captivated by Deceptive Dimension, 2020, a small, lively canvas in which an unstable checkerboard of white and intensely colored not-quite squares hovers over a fragile web of short, slender lines and patches of paler hues; it was impossible to decide what was on top of what, which kept me fascinated and a little uncomfortable—a remarkably satisfying combination, as it turned out.
“Artists are cultural critics — but painting is a language.”
https://hyperallergic.com/610190/beer-with-a-painter-lisa-corinne-davis/
Pollock-Krasner grants have enabled artists to create new work, purchase needed materials and pay for studio rent, as well as their personal expenses. Past recipients of Pollock-Krasner grants acknowledge their critical impact in allowing concentrated time for studio work, and in preparing for exhibitions and other professional opportunities such as accepting a residency.
Davis recognizes that grids, networks, and circuits are not purely a product of the art world, and there are myriad contexts in which the government and corporate America deploy them.
HUDSON, New York — In 2016, Lisa Corinne Davis published an important essay in artcritical, “Towards a more fluid definition of Blackness.” In it, she writes:
Many African-American artists feel the obligation to represent Blackness. My position as an abstract painter allows me to manifest my own sense of self — my black self — as an expression of self-determination and freedom, while avoiding an oppositional stance. I do not believe this position is “post-racial” since I am not sure that that is possible. Yet the current system of how to include black artists in the mainstream seems to be stuck in tropes from the past. I do not want to negate discussions of race and racism in art, but I do want to open the conversation by detaching Blackness from a narrow racial term, allowing it to be more pliable. This will not cause current and historical racial differences to cease to exist, but it will enable artists who are not foregrounding Blackness in their work to become equally important members of the conversation. By rupturing accepted racial boundaries, subtlety and aesthetics will play a social role in the expansion of that conversation.
Davis’s comments reminded me of something that Stanley Whitney said to me in an interview nearly a decade earlier (The Brooklyn Rail, October 2008):
With African-Americans, race is always a big issue, and how the art answers the call to race. Everyone understands how to be a doctor or a lawyer — a social activist — to answer the call to race, but what does painting have to do with it? […] Being an abstract painter, what does that do? Where does that fit in? People have a hard time with that.
As Black artists of different generations, who moved to New York to pursue painting and elected to become abstract artists, Davis and Whitney have had to find ways to respond to, negotiate with, and push back against the expectation that their work should embody an overtly political component.
In her current exhibition, Lisa Corinne Davis: All Shook Up at Pamela Salisbury Gallery (through November 2), accompanied by an insightful catalogue essay by the noted art historian Nancy Princenthal, Davis’s long pursuit of layering multiple visual systems and schemas has — to my eye, at least — reached a new state of visual resolution, one that feels deliberately unstable, approaching collapse or collision. With this breakthrough, multiple ways of reading her work have come into starker focus.
Installation view, Lisa Corinne Davis: All Shook Up at Pamela Salisbury Gallery, Hudson, NY
The 15 vertically oriented works are all in either oil or oil and acrylic on canvas, panel, or paper. In scale, they range from 14 by 12 inches to 60 by 45 inches. Compositionally, they share the superimposition of open linear structures over one another. These structures evoke skewed and decomposing grids, disturbed networks, circuitry, collapsing and crashing systems, cells, and even fishnets, pipes, and girders — elements from both the virtual and physical world.
In addition to these features, she includes puzzle-like parts in solid colors and linear bands arranged at various angles, as well as different-colored planes, often abutting each other, spanning part of the canvas, like a path of flat or uneven paving stones.
Looking into Davis’s paintings, we cannot tell how far back they go; this suggests a depthless space that shares something of our experience of a digital screen. Although she uses green and/or blue in every work, she does not seem to have a set palette. She often uses punning alliteration in her titles, such as “Flitting Foundation” (2019) and “Miraculous Measure” (2020). They summon a range of associations regarding how the corporate world and government develop ways to identify the individual.
Whereas Whitney composes by laying down rectangles of color, which he goes over or changes, within a non-overall grid, Davis layers together different structures and forms, which she might scrape down, leaving a ghostly echo, before beginning again. As Princenthal points out, citing a statement by Davis, “the paintings begin on canvas, with paint.” One could define Davis as an incremental process painter, as the layers of marks don’t follow any obvious trajectory.
What differentiates her recent paintings from those I saw a few years ago is that the relationship between the parts and structures seems tighter. By that, I mean that as we shift our focus between the open structures and the various forms, we do not get caught up in the eccentricity of a part. Instead, our attention shifts back and forth smoothly.
Lisa Corinne Davis, “Notional Norm” (2020), acrylic and oil on panel, 24 x 18 inches
While these paintings might not initially seem overtly political, I think it would be wrong to reach such a conclusion. We live in a world where everything we do is political, from whether or not we buy a can of Goya pinto beans to whether or not we believe that birth control is a private decision in which the government has no right to interfere. Davis recognizes that grids, networks, and circuits are not purely a product of the art world, and there are myriad contexts in which the government and corporate America deploy them.
Davis’s overlaying of structures underscores the fact that numerous organizations have developed innumerable methods to track and identify all of us, in order to discern how and where we fit into a larger pattern. Once we begin to see her painting through this lens, another consideration begins to grab hold. What might a color or a sequence of colors stand for? Color — as we know from experience — is neither neutral nor equal.
At the same time, the twisted and slanted angles at which the linear configurations intersect and overlap, the refusal to settle for the comforts of an overall structure, can be seen as Davis’s determination to undo the grid’s hold on us. Cognizant that each of us is constantly being tracked, and that our behavior is being registered and fed into a series of overlapping systems designed to decipher what we are up to, Davis’s colors also take on a different meaning. What might they be a code for?
This sense of color further distinguishes her work from other abstract painters. My only suggestion is that she bring in more of the highly artificial colors that are available in acrylic, as this would accentuate the singularity that she has already attained.
Lisa Corinne Davis, “Deceptive Dimension” (2020), oil on canvas, 20 x 16 inches
Davis adds more twists to our experience when she titles a work on paper “Registered Impersonation” (2020) or a painting “Captious Computation” (2019). What does it mean when a computer is programmed to record our trivial faults? Is this the brave new world we are headed toward? The artist’s ability to call forth the invisible world, in which we are constantly leaving traces of our presence, injects an unexpected and much-needed jolt into abstraction.
In “Specious Position” (2020), Davis divides the painting horizontally into two unequal areas, with the painting’s upper quarter defined by an unloosened grid of white lines on a blue ground. Over this seemingly rumpled surface she has drawn thick brown lines dividing the grid into separate states. Below this grid are two more grids, one composed of blue lines and the other of turquoise on a white ground. Both of the lower grids overlap each other, so that we might read them as a single unit or as two distinct but related schemas.
The tension between the separate states and overlaid grids, and their gesture toward unity and uniformity, is key to the painting. There is constant pressure felt with every overlay, division, element, and intersection. Together, they might lead us to reflect upon what stances we have taken and why.
Lisa Corinne Davis: All Shook Up continues at Pamela Salisbury Gallery (362 1/2 Warren Street, Hudson, New York) through November 2.
Lisa Corinne Davis, Registered Impersonation, 2020, acrylic and oil on paper, 14 x 12 inches
Contributed by Sangram Majumdar / Lisa Corinne Davis, whose solo is on view at Pamela Salisbury through November 2, is an abstract painter who is known for her engaging explorations of map imagery, codes, and drawing systems. Recently she has been thinking about the destablization resulting from Covid, politics, and the current cultural focus on race and identity. “The paintings are really an abstract manifestation of the psychological places I’ve existed in,” she told me, “not a politicized statement of what you may not see or may not know about me….All of a sudden, for the first time in my life, I’m a ‘black woman,’ writ large – because of current culture.”
Sangram Majumdar: Let’s start with the title of your exhibition “All Shook Up” currently up at Pamela Salisbury Gallery in Hudson, NY. Why Elvis?
Lisa Corinne Davis: So the title “All Shook Up” is twofold. On one hand it’s talking about the cultural time we’re in, that we’re all kind of shaken up by COVID, politics, racial unrest, et cetera, but also refers to the deep destabilizing force in my work. There is no terra firma. In general, I’m trying to shake up systems, like the system of decoding race. This always comes from a personal place for me. Throughout my life and no matter how long people have known me or talked with me, at some point they say, “well, what are you?”
I’m thinking “I’m the person you’ve been having a relationship with and so forth for God knows how long!” There’s a series of codes that they’re trying to apply to me, like blackness, whiteness, mixed, urban, provincial. People do it all the time in order to have a quick, firm footing into accessing a person.
I want to destabilize this, in a kind of abstract sense, so that all orientations of perception, whether it’s aerial or micro or macro or a facade is mixed. You can never quite stay put.
Lisa Corinne Davis, Miraculous Measure, 2020, oil on panel, 40 x 35 inches
SM: I completely see what you mean in terms of destabilization. In Miraculous Measure, 2020, the floating rectangles hint seem to suggest that they are pieces from a large shape, one that’s being subdivided or expanding beyond the frame. And the spiraling structure in Spineless Scheme II, 2020 is destabilizing in a different way. It made me think of what it would feel like to experience loss of gravity, as if suspended in air or water. It’s a very disorienting space that you create, but there’s a precision and clarity to the structures.
LCD: I lean on structure because the structure is the boundary. Like in culture too. And if a grid is supposed to behave a certain way in a painting, like as a democratic surface, oriented, a measured zone, how can I make it not quite do that? I don’t completely tear it apart, but also I’m just not going to quite play by the rules that are given here.
Everything I start with in the painting I try to make it misbehave as it travels, disobeying the codes that the painting is supposed to adhere to. So, again, with linear perspective, things seem to be going back towards a point on the horizon, well, that’s the rules of the game. But I’m going to say, well, what happens if you just kind of step slightly aside from that?
Lisa Corinne Davis, installation view at Pamela Salisbury
Lisa Corinne Davis, Spineless Scheme II, oil on panel, 27 x 20 inches
SM: Your paintings seem to be calling attention to how things actually are, how a system is altered in real time, in real space, as opposed to its planned ideal.
LCD: Right, exactly. And again, back to the parallel to the personal. So this black girl, you know, ended up at the Quaker private school and living in the Orthodox Jewish neighborhood.
SM: So how do you construct these paintings? How does the subjective and objective aspects of your thinking and making come together?
LCD: Lately, I’ve been starting with a field of color, pretty warm, hot color, because I’ve been interested in losing that back plane of the canvas as much as I can to light. So I tend to start with a color and then I just start weaving. Let’s say I’ll start with something more geometric and then I will have a conversation with the organic and try to disrupt what I started.
SM: This idea of a ‘conversation’ also seems to play out metaphorically between the word pairs in your painting titles.
LCD: I have these running lists of words. Some of them I think of as objective words, like rules or graphs or measures. And I have this other list of what I think of as subjective words, words which are more psychological. I put them one next to the other, so one is disrupting the other in the title.
Lisa Corinne Davis, Phantasmal Placement, 2018, oil on panel, 48 x 36 inches
SM: In a lot of the recent paintings, there’s a blue-green-gray that I associate with the map reference. But it also brings up ideas about atmosphere. And then these bursts of color, like words, like confetti come to my mind. In Phantasmal Placement, 2018 I think of kites in the sky. There’s an incredible amount of space between the multi-color form on the top to the one in the middle. The space feels vast.
LCD: The colors also refer to suggestions of lived locations and also mapped locations. When we think of map colors, it’s primarily yellow, blue, red. They’re kind of, you know, these kind of soulless colors. And then we have colors that are truly visceral suggesting toxicity or luminosity or spectacle. I try to use both in a painting and again, sometimes I use it in an alignment with those subjective or objective spaces or places or suggestions, and sometimes I just use it as a disruption, a disruptive component.
Years ago, I got very interested in Aboriginal painting, and how they are constantly working around the canvas, working around the surface. So I keep going until there’s enough spatial reads, orientations and that there’s some shift from a macro to a micro view of something. Sometimes they go too far and they get sanded down. And then I use that as the clue to starting the conversation again.
SM: That idea of working from a residue seems particularly visible in paintings like Spineless Scheme II, 2020. Are there ever associations that you start seeing in the paintings, either metaphorically or visually, that you don’t want in your work?
LCD: No, I actually don’t ever go there. I know things that people have said, biological organs and, you know, certainly references to landscape elements and or street elements or – but I’ve never consciously thought of that. Social, racial, gender issues are all going to mix with what you come away with. I can’t and don’t want to take that from you and I didn’t want people to take it from me. I sometimes wonder if references should be more evident in the paintings, but I think for now I’ve decided it becomes too political. The paintings are really an abstract manifestation of the psychological places I’ve existed in, you know, not a politicized statement of what you may not see or may not know about me.
SM: You are talking about time and memory and the past. How did this body of work begin?
LCD: When my children were born I began making ink self-portraits and I would cover them with graphite. So when you looked at them, you could only see a kind of glimmer of a person below a semi reflective surface. Simultaneously, I also started to think about the appearance that I’ve dealt with my whole life. I was thinking about the appearance of what my first child would be with a white Canadian husband. What is this kid going to look like? Me? And then I thought, well, what will be the difference if he looks like X or Y or Z? What will that mean for his life? So that got me interested in people’s ideas around visual cues and determinations of behavior around culture and race. These ideas could not be expressed literally in a painting. There was no other language than abstraction that seemed to make sense.
SM: So it’s almost like what’s behind that graphite drawing has become the subject matter and you’ve jettisoned the representational signifiers whose primary function was to call attention to the image, like a “come here” sign or something.
LCD: Yeah, exactly. You couldn’t have said it better.
SM: The titles of your paintings also seem to be a “calling out” of sorts. Through titles like Schematic Sham, Bogus Basis, Registered Impersonation, (all 2020) we get a sense of what’s happening in the world or maybe how you feel about it.
LCD: Some people never really registered the titles and some people like you see it immediately as part of the plan here. But yeah, I work with fixed identity on many levels.
I think that’s a thing that happens when you don’t grow up with a clear, firm cultural identity. It’s like you’re constantly looking at the world and how to navigate different spaces in it. You try things on, you know, like you look at it and you see what you want and you decide how you feel about it and you maybe take a little bit and toss the rest away.
Lisa Corinne Davis, Schamtic Sham, 2020, acrylic and oil on paper,14 x 12 inches
Lisa Corinne Davis, Bogus Basis, 2020, acrylic and oil on panel, 20 x 16 inches
SM: Identity is front and center on so many levels right now, culturally, racially, nationally. Meanwhile, your paintings don’t call out their own gender or racial identity or sexual orientation in any overt way. And you’re making paintings that are navigating this in-between space, abstract on one sense while riffing off of real world conditions in another. What does that feel like?
LCD: All of a sudden, for the first time in my life, I’m a “black woman”, writ large – because of current culture. So now I’m thinking, okay, well, what does that mean? I’m not running away from it, it’s so who I am, but I’ve had to think about it again. It’s about perception. Right now people need to perceive me that way.
On some level, I can’t paint anything beyond what I am. The paintings don’t sit quietly in a room. They are always re-forming themselves, adjusting to someone’s perceptions over time.
“Lisa Corinne Davis: All Shook Up,” Pamela Salisbury Gallery, 362.5 Warren Street, Hudson, NY. through November 2, 2020.
About the author: Born in Kolkata, India, Sangram Majumdar is a Professor of Painting at the Maryland Institute College of Art.
https://brooklynrail.org/2020/07/artseen/The-Pursuit-of-Aesthetics-Artwork-Created-During-Quarantine
Pam Glick, Lisa Corinne Davis, and Julian Kreimer all engage in esoteric and calligraphic forms of diagramming. These works may be unsettlingly frenetic, but they face inwards, seemingly exploring the roiling of the artist’s psyche. Perhaps these troughs and peaks, cross-outs, or flows sharply doubling on themselves are quarantine angst, but they seem consistent with pre-existing work—and consistency is a comfort. These three artists, however, diverge substantially in their aesthetic approaches. Davis interrogates the concept of mapping, treating it as a visual form that paradoxically deploys structures of great conceptual regularity to reveal and present difference. Kreimer offers another way of conceiving the task of charting, stressing movement as flows of vibrant and colorful cross-hatching interweave through patches and phrases of pooled pigment, textures, and patterns. His forms can be read visually or assigned a set of metaphorical values: we wonder if they refer to topographies of greater or lesser intensity, especially armed with the knowledge that Kreimer’s practice tends to straddle the line separating representation and abstraction.
http://www.soundandvisionpodcast.com/blog/2020/4/9/lisa-corinne-davis
The exhibit is curated by Lamerol Gatewood and features artists Danny Simmons, Gail Shaw-Clemons, Garry Grant, and Lisa Corinne Davis.
The New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) has announced the recipients and finalists of the NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship program, which it has administered for the past 32 years with leadership support from the New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA). The organization has awarded a total of $623,000 to 89 artists throughout New York State in the following disciplines: Fiction, Folk/Traditional Arts, Interdisciplinary Work, Painting, and Video/Film. This year’s recipients range in age between 26 and 77. Fifteen finalists, who do not receive a cash award, but benefit from a range of other NYFA services, were also announced.
Mixed Bag at Real Estate Gallery Curated by Joe Bradley and Jeremy Willis
Mixed Bag is the title of the show currently on view at Real Estate in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. The walls of the modest venue are covered in small-scale drawings and paintings from veteran, mid-career, and emerging artists. While “mixed bag” implies an assortment of things randomly tossed together, it also suggests both positive and negative elements. And there is a polarity to the show, tensions between opposing forces.
Mixed Bag is curated by Jeremy Willis and Joe Bradley, who are actually firmly linked in multiple instances to artists in the show as these artists are also linked to each other. This exhibition is anything but randomly thrown together. Joe Bradley has been involved in shows with several of the artists showing in Mixed Bag, including Steve DiBenedetto, Michael Williams, Brian Bellot, and Chris Martin. Like Willis, Lisa Corinne Davis is a graduate of Hunter College’s fine arts program and currently a professor there. Another Hunter graduate, Alteronce Gumby, did an in-depth interview with Stanley Whitney for BOMB Magazine where he discussed some of the fundamental ideas behind his work.
Stanley Whitney is well known for his colorful, abstract paintings. However, in a 2015 interview with Alteronce Gumby for BOMB Magazine’s Oral History Project, which documented the life stories of New York City’s black artists, Whitney discussed the profound importance of drawing and line. He said, “For me . . . I always had color. I was born with the color. But to put the color in the right space and give it a real intellect, you need to do drawing.” He sites Mondrian, Morris Louis, and Van Gogh as having great influence on his drawing, especially when he got most bogged down in his painting.
And even Stanley’s paintings are based on drawn grids, which he then paints on top of. “There’s the grid,” he goes on to explained, “which should be very orderly, and then you put the color, and it throws the whole thing off.” Untitled (1996) is a black and white drawing done in graphite on white paper. Black color blocks dance within a loose grid. The piece is just as lively as his paintings and reminiscent of sheet music in form. The animated playing of black and white piano keys may also come to mind. In that same BOMB Magazine interview, Whitney discusses the large significance music has had in his life, owing to his existence and development within the black community.
Lisa Corinne Davis serves as Head of Drawing at Hunter. Her abstract work is more directly rooted in cultural identity than Stanley’s, and in issues of social categorization, but is defined by a similar push and pull between mathematical lines and organic expression.
In an interview at The College of Saint Rose this year, Davis explained, “I work with a vocabulary that has two parts. The first I call ‘objective,’ meaning there are things you trust more than other things: straight lines, grids, maps, information systems. The second I call “subjective,” which is more psychological: organic forms, spills and drips, toxic or artificial colors. In every painting, I mix the two, so the viewer is caught between whether this is information or facts they’re receiving, or something they have to interpret as an individual.”
Congenital Computation (2017) is a black and white painting done in acrylic. An imperfect grid is present, made-up of prominent black and white lines that seem to work as bars behind which a webbing stretches and gathers, giving the piece an uneven depth and course through space and time. Something resembling a necklace chain with a diamond-cut ball at the end appears to swing and unravel from one of the bars. Evoked is the interplay between incarceration, segregation, race, and class throughout American history and in our current society and culture.
Peter Saul addresses cultural identity and American politics head-on with outrageous, even deranged, figurative paintings. He has depicted nazis, stereotypical Jews, lurid scenes of the Vietnam war, and political figures such as Hitler, Stalin, Reagan, Bush, and Trump. Stylistically, his art draws on both Surrealism and comic art and is an unlikely mixture of beauty and negativity.
In an interview with ArtScene Cal, perhaps revealing something at the root of this fusion, Saul rather simply stated, “If I can find something to paint, a good subject, I feel grateful, and I paint it with enthusiasm.” In an interview with Brooklyn Rail he explained further, “It’s not America’s fault that it became deranged in my art. It’s the way I saw it because I needed to be an artist, and that was the only way I could get my personality into the thing.”
Like Whitney, Saul is well known for his bright and colorful painting, while placing a great and lesser known importance on drawing. Saul usually draws his subject matter several times before moving on to paint and sometimes leaves the lines showing through as guidelines. Untitled (Date unknown) is a pencil and paper piece that depicts a maze of paint that sloshes down the page ending in a brush that is being ripped from the design by a cartoon character making a getaway off the page–only it’s hand visible in the right-hand corner. In Saul’s signature way, it is a skillfully executed piece infused with wit and humor.
Brian Bellot’s work was featured in a group show curated by Peter Saul entitled If You’re Accidentally Not Included, Don’t Worry About It at Zurcher Gallery, Paris in 2014. Like Saul, Bellot utilizes humor, but his is a more light-hearted sort of playfulness influenced by Dadaism and Absurdism. In an interview with Art News, Bellot stated, “I have two impulses constantly at play: one is the formalist who wants to make elegant things, and the other is the absurdist who wants to destroy them.”
Grumps (2014) is a perfect example of these opposing impulses at work. A misshapen bunch of grapes is painted on a rumpled piece of paper with corners slightly torn. The word “grapes” is painted above in large, capital letters. The piece seems to play off the classic still-life, while resembling a makeshift, cardboard sign one might see at any fruit stand. It’s subject matter is sweet. It’s title is sour, bringing the phrase sour grapes to mind; these grapes that cannot be eaten and have been painted using mustard.
When you enter Mixed Bag the title seems perfectly apt, but scratch a bit at the surface, and it becomes quite clear that the artists featured here are not a randomly thrown together bunch at all. They are a carefully hand-selected group bound together by educational institutions, professional projects, and shared concepts.
Mixed Bag
Through March 30th, 2018
Real Estate
1144 Manhattan Avenue
Brooklyn, New York 11222
Massry exhibit asks viewers to chart own paths
Lisa Corinne Davis likes to lead us on and not quite give anything away in her recent paintings at the Esther Massry Gallery. This show of over a dozen large, energetic, methodical oils on canvas plays with shapes and colors as much as it does any actual places or spaces. They are abstract, but they succeed because they suggest that they aren't, completely, abstract.
The title of the show, "Turbulent Terrain," tips the artist's hand slightly, if you take it literally. What come off at first like playful, all-over abstractions quickly complicate into some semblance of diagrams or maps. Many have loose grid-like nets from edge to edge, but these are distorted a bit, and the order of the surface gets dimpled and nudged.
It's as if there is a topography underneath a visual semiotic surface — a series of familiar shapes and relationships that in fact mean nothing but are a response to something real below. Something unseen, but hinted at. Lines become rivers, or schematic suggestions of pipelines and arteries, or walking routes on a crumpled tourist map of Florence. Or just meandering lines that follow their own directions and impulses across the canvas.
"Groundless Construct," with its expansive mixture of components, is characteristic and revealing, in part because there are some small areas of black and white lines that really are taken from a street map (or made to look like it). Elsewhere are some slightly irregular bluish squares and then lots of very irregular orange polygons that make a rough funnel shape over the top of things. Some thin lines like rope snake here and there, collecting at the bottom edge as if gravity was working from the top down.
It's all a curious, beautiful enterprise. The winding, linear elements, like the brown pipeline in "Analytical Anarchism," lead your eye around, looping and finding other textures and components to take in. Some of the simplest paintings, like the mostly yellow "Cogent Concoction," with rows of little bubble-like beads and other lines, flatten and become less demanding, and less interesting (though still pretty). Others might seem awkward to some, or too similar to the others to stand out, but there is a broader feeling in the show of clear intention, and a subtle balance of elements with the formal control to succeed.
This kind of painting — abstract but anchored in something readable and vaguely familiar — comes ultimately from the 1950s works of Jasper Johns by way of 1970s postmodern theory laden with signifiers separated from what they signify. You might be able to brush it off as a lot of well-done and attractive art for art's sake, with a stubborn sensation of being inconsequential, all this beautiful layering and visual play with ambiguous non-meaning.
But against that natural reaction I would first point out all the interesting aspects of the sources suggested here: the idea of maps and spaces made into their own objects, the notion of fictional dalliances constructed with known notational devices. And what does she mean by including rainbow stripes in several paintings, as if snipped from rainbow flags? Maybe nothing. And what if the "maps" implied are actually rooted in real places, or real schematics?
Maybe we can also embrace painting for the joy of painting. The mashup of lines, splotches, dimpled grids, and giddy colors makes for really interesting new surfaces. On canvas. With good old oil paint. You get sucked in, and the more closely you look the more collisions and layering you find, on and on.
William Jaeger is a frequent contributor to the Times Union.
Each year, the current National Academicians nominate and elect a new class of members in a tradition dating back to 1825. This fall, it is our pleasure to welcome the following artists and architects
Visual Art
Suzanne Anker
Eve Aschheim
Kathy Butterly
Peter Campus
Lisa Corinne Davis
Teresita Fernández
Theaster Gates
Glenn Goldberg
Harmony Hammond
Alfredo Jaar
Elizabeth King
Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt
Marilyn Minter
Odili Donald Odita
Mira Schor
John Walker
William T. Williams
Architecture
Craig Dykers (Snøhetta)
David Lake and Ted Flato (Lake Flato)
Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa (SANAA)
