Art-99: a 99 word review.

Nicol Allan @ Davis & Langdale through May 2, 2009

In these simple collages of organic materials including rare, handmade papers and paste from a British Museum recipe, architectural forms emerge from flat muted hues of earth toned shapes mostly brown and green, with brick red and minimal blue. The compositions follow an organic cubist model. Though they are textless, there is a trace amount of mark making. Some look like plan views of rural interchanges or baseball diamonds. Flatness is defied by diagonals indicating a doorway, the side of a building, a shadow. There is an idylic mood, like the sublime might dwell in the simplest shapes of civilization.

Art-99; a 99 word review.

Tara Donavan @ PaceWildenstein through May 2, 2009

Twenty four large scale "drawings" hung edge to edge, most of which are in two values, delineating the fractures in plates of broken glass. Visually these are very direct and expose their technique. They are both patently representational and profoundly abstract. They look like nothing but schematic studies of how glass shatters. Another group employs a different, unknown technique. Their appearance is of a fine, off white, irregular net or web upon a black ground. The web-like accumulation seems scribbled or spiraling. They oppose the others. Its's unclear how they were done, and they are completely non-objective.

Art-99; a 99 word review.

Simryn Gill @ Tracy Williams through May 2, 2009

The garden level space of the village townhouse gallery exhibits an array of smallish spheroids on the floor varying greatly in size and materials. Several are termite balls, one a plaster cast of the inside of a pumpkin, another a wad of rubber bands.  Some are composed of entwined foliage, one from corrugated paper. The first floor presents black and white photographs of panes of tinted glass leaning inside an abandoned and scavenged home shot just as the sun lights them, with two bronze sculptures formed in the fissures of a dry river bed.  All three lines of work rely on collaboration with natural processes.

Art-99; a 99 word review.

Noah Davis @ Jack Tilton through May 16, 2009

Six oils depict poor or third world people, some laboring in dress clothes. In one, the lone white person is a victim. In the other five, it's  more unclear what is happening, but the semi-rural exteriors range from tense to disturbing. Despite the power of the subject matter, execution steals the show. The notation is so mixed, washes, impasto, wild gestures broad and minute, as to threaten depiction. The technical variety is accentuated by colorization; high key tints and high hue contrast between underpainting and finish. These effects and the paintings' realism trouble each other and resist reconciliation.

Art-99; a 99 word review.

John Outterbridge @ Tilton through May 16, 2009.

Rustic looking wall hung assemblages, some based on folk jewelry. Many are vaguely heraldic like large charm bracelets and seem to include antique horse tackle or rigging, others look like broken off parts of simple farming tools hewn from chunks of wood. Is there an indictment of burden in the way the tackle morphs into the bones or horns of the implied animal, in the severed dreadlocks? A work containing a sickle blade, severed hair and a tiny american flag politicizes the class origins of folk art and continues its tradition of social critique.

Art -99: a 99 word review

Tacita Dean @ Marian Goodman through April 30, 2009.

Large and small scale photographs of natural world objects with the background painted out by hand: the objects look unnatural and the works unlike photography.  The rocks start to suggest animal forms in the same way abstraction or clouds can.  The beauty of the trees is enhanced by the white paint which must be more dexterous but is also more interesting. Web like patterns emerge in the ground of Painted Kotzch Trees I-IV, while in the large scale "gravure project" the black ground lacks such nuance. With two 16 mm films, one a negotiated, sunlight obsessed tribute to Beuys.