A Dream Within a Dream is a group exhibition that mines the unconscious. Each artist derives inspiration from the painting/sculpting process as well as the immersive of a projected installation. Curated by Alan Goolman of the Lockwood Gallery, the painters and sculptors: Farrell Brickhouse, William Gary, Joel Longenecker, David Pollack, Claudia Renfro together with the installation artist and filmmaker Beverly Peterson, explore the expressive edge of the mindful eye. Curator Alan Goolman’s vision echoes the current oneiric theme of the 59th Venice Biennale’s, The Milk of Dreams. Goolman was inspired by the Edgar Allen Poe quote: “…all that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream”. With this quote as a guiding theme, Goolman draws together artists whose artworks are united by ambiguity, a distinct commitment to form and a certain exuberant gestural expressionism.
Starting with the stark, shocked paintings of William Gary, this dreamscape becomes panicked with anguished brushwork. The panic-stricken mark-making sets off alarms startling in their explosive energy. Gary’s fractured, painted planes are ultimately seized in an instant of emergency – and emergence – in a world at once commanding and terrifying.
In the next room, the oil paintings of Farryl Brickhouse reel with archetypal narratives worked densely onto canvas. With insistent gestural energy, Brickhouse carves mythic figures with sweeping gestures then deftly knits them back together in a sparkling night world. Brickhouse searches for the color of dusk at the edge of consciousness where the deepest tones meet and match together with the shimmering glitter of stardust.
Across the gallery from Farryl Brickhouse, Joel Longenecker creates dense artwork that hovers at the cusp of painting and sculpture. The volumes of churning paint and the harmonics of color dynamics give Longenecker paintings a geologic and climatic power that summons a mighty topography of seething color and form.
In the center room, Claudia Renfro’s paintings on paper and cast bronze sculptures propose a whimsical world of carnivals, masks and above all, shoes! The electric atmosphere between her figures and their eccentric environments is consistently whimsical. In Renfro watercolors, clowns ask for a light, a dancing cactus entertains a tall dandy and a woman in curlers, and a ghost rises from the dead tol tell silent stories of a world where little makes sense. Renfro’s cast bronze sculptures of cartoonish shoes are not only stories of shape and form but also a twisted sense of strange fashion.
Nearby, In the abstracted luminous worlds of David Pollack’s watercolors, light shimmers and refracts. The thinnest veils of pigment glow through one another leading the viewer deeper into their hidden hues. The gently percussive brushwork allows for the emergence of a calm glow that promises a better day.
A pleasant surprise in the exhibition Dream Within A Dream is the creation of Shakey’s Meadow, an installation bythe light artist and filmmaker, Beverly Peterson. This dedicated environment has an all encompassing, almost Virtual Reality space. With projected digitized stars in a recreated night forest, Peterson plumbs the depths of mystery with her illuminated space. This immersive experience envelopes the visitor and invites participation as the outline of a house becomes a vehicle for transformation from one dimension to the next.
The exhibition Dream Within a Dream is on view at the Lockwood Gallery, Kingston NY through May 8, 2022
The Venice Biennale inspires the entire city to host innumerable exhibitions and pop-up art shows from almost every nation in the world. Every street, calle and piazza hosts gallery exhibits of paintings, sculpture, drawing, prints, digital, film, as well as performance art, music and theater. Campo di San’Isepo, located in Castello near the Biennale Gardens, is no exception. Castello 925, with two locations on Fondamenta San Giuseppe, presents two American artists: a solo exhibition of paintings by Martin Weinstein at the 780 Fondamenta San Giuseppe annex gallery and artwork by Bobbie Moline-Kramer as part of a two person exhibit up the street at number 925.
Martin Weinstein Vedute Palinsesti Installation view (left to right)- Venice, Santa Maria, 2 Evenings and Venice, 2 Afternoons at Castello 925 Annex Gallery located at Fondamenta San Giuseppe 780, Sestiere Castello, Venice VE though July 10, 2022
Martin Weinstein: Vedute Palinsesti
The title of Martin Weinstein’s exhibition, Vedute Palinsesti, refers to the remaining traces after earlier marks are effaced to make room for newer writing in medieval manuscripts. Like the concept of the palimpsest, (Palinsesto in Italian), Weinstein’s paintings are layers of different points in time, with memories of former experiences overlain by more recent visual experiences expressed by luminous, gestural and deft brushwork.
By painting on layers of translucent acrylic sheets and allowing these layers to re-combine and glow through one another, Martin Weinstein presents different stages of seeing. At first glance, these artworks seem rooted in the landscape tradition however the paintings present perceptions that together become an individual record of space and being. In Vedute Palinsesti, the combined images are painted in multiple sessions of direct observation from Weinstein’s rented studio in the Castello sector of Venice. Painted at different times, different days – and sometimes even years apart – the artworks are always from the same point of view. The final layer, placed in the furthest back, is an abstract panel that supports the realistic layers above signifying the ultimate unknowability of reality that underpins all perception. These multiple sheets of acrylic record a period of time, experience and memory and acknowledge that all these perceptions are illusory. Richard Vine observes about Weinstein’s unique painting style: “Although the results are deceptively traditional-looking landscapes, the process and the pictorial technique are quietly radical.”
The 11 paintings in this installation follow the times of the day starting with the soft pink glow of morning light, traveling to the brilliant clarity of mid-day and slowly transforming to the dark shadows of evening punctuated by the sharp, staccato specks of reflected light. Because of the perennially shifting layers within each painting, the artworks belie their small scale, each one measuring not more than 11” x 16.5” x 2.5” and therefore appear much larger and nuanced. The visual cacophony of diverse watercrafts plying the mouth of the Grand Canal simmers down to a memory in the tiny dancing lights of the night views. No matter the time of day, the heavens never lose their drama as clouds roil across the landscape and absorb bristling towers as well as the soft, rounded domes of Venice. Sometimes, the painted waters part briefly to reveal a second church floating in their waves, other times, it is a tower valiantly pressing against the storm clouds that finds its echo in the depths of the evening sky.
Although Martin Weinstein’s paintings are specific to Venice, the artist uses these historic and contemporary manifestations of this famous city as a catalyst for examining and isolating the layered process of painting. Rather than hide each painted level surface permanently below the previous layer, leaving the finished layer to sum up and seal the process, Martin Weinstein instead isolates each level of painting, allowing the viewers’ mind to recombine them and amplify the optical illusion of vision. It is through this spatial illusion that Weinstein reveals his true subject matter – not gorgeous architecture of a beloved city nor the small human activity that scurries about but the slowly enveloping experience of time.
Martin Weinstein’s virtual catalogue for Vedute Palinsesti can be viewed here. Martin Weinstein Vedute Palinsesti is on view at Castello 925, Fondamenta San Giuseppe 780, Sestiere Castello, Venice Italy through July 10, 2022
Bobbie Moline-Kramer: Power of One
Bobbie Moline-Kramer Power of One: (left) Religion, INRI, Crown of Thorns and (right) Dame Jane Goodall, 4-3-1939, oil and acrylic paint on wood panel, 12” x 12” each
In the larger Castello 925 Gallery down the street, Bobbie Moline-Kramer exhibits together with painter Antonio Pauciulo. California-based artist Bobbie Moline-Kramer’s exhibition The Power of One is an installation that examines time, space and destiny using the study of constellations as a touchstone. Employing 16th-century glazing and gilding techniques, Moline-Kramer incises unique sky charts particular to each heroic figure with the same precision that antique celestial maps were prepared and painted by Italian and Dutch Renaissance masters. Each painting is a portrait of individuals selected by the artist for their courage to make a difference in the world. The astrological profiles of these various individuals are intertwined with the position of the stars at the time they were born or died (or in the case of a portrait of Italo Calvino, both birth and death are linked together. Another Moline-Kramer painting series depicts a family tree of birds representing the artist’s own ancestry and embedded history. However, Moline-Kramer does not just linger in the past but creates an adjacent installation that employs cutting edge technology to deconstruct her paintings into 3-D computer printed layers. Each layer of this installation is suspended from the ceiling and appears as ephemeral, variously hued flakes of sky floating down to earth. This paradoxical synergy combines facts with mysticism, mythology with mathematics, and traditional Renaissance technique with 21st century computer printing technology renders this exhibition not only about time and space but most importantly, about being. In the artist’s own words: “The concept of this body of work is twofold: the wonder of our world, and the power of one person to change that world”.
Bobbie Moline-Kramer’s Power of One installation view: left, RBG and right, Al di Là, both artworks created through 3-D printed and hand-molded acrylic plates
Moline-Kramer’s artwork is exhibited alongside the paintings of Antonio Pauciulo who places himself as a portraitist at the center of man’s questions about man. By setting himself the task to define himself through the mirror of the other, Pauciulo transposes this awareness of himself into the act of painting.
Antonio Pauciulo (left) Bobbie Moline-Kramer Family Tree (right)
Castello 925 presents Bobbie Moline-Kramer The Power of One together with Antonio Pauciulo Artificial Creatures, in Castello 925, Fondamenta San Giuseppe through 10 July, 2022.
“The great strength of art and artists is to digest the dramatic crisis of recent years and to propose it again in a creative key” – Cecilia Alemani, curator, 59th Venice Biennale The Milk of Dreams
Nothing prepares the visitor to the Venice Biennale for the total arts immersion throughout the city. It isn’t just the historical collections in the Accademia, the Churches and the many municipal museums that host art historical masterpieces but during this 59th Biennale, many storefronts have been made into pop-up art galleries with installations from all over the world. Because of the vast number of venues, it is almost impossible to see all that there is to see in Venice but fortunately, many exhibits are consolidated in two main venues – The Arsenale and the Giardini Biennale.
The Arsenale
This year’s exhibition at the Arsenale emphasizes techniques that are usually associated with crafts such as weaving, ceramics, beadwork, embroidery and even horticulture are presented alongside more traditional painting and sculptural media. With this widespread employment of the more typically feminized hand-made processes, the Biennale highlights themes of women and their work. An example found in the Arsenale is the enormous totemic fabric heads of Tau Lewis, a Jamaican-Canadian artist from Toronto. Using scrap fabrics, fur and leather, these epic forms are monuments to an archaic religion or manifestations of ancient and powerful deities. Other featured artists include the open, woven forms of Japanese-American Ruth Asawa, the immense, glittering tapestries of South African artist Igshaan Adams, and the intricate, beaded flags of Haiti’s Myrlande Constant.
In the Biennale Gardens, the overarching theme in many exhibitions is the landscape of the body. Hungarian sculptor Zsófia Keresztes’ mosaic-covered artworks are deceptively soft, pastel-colored, fluid forms evoking body parts such as eyes and lips as well as abstracted organs. Chained together, these sculptures are at once separate but inextricably linked with confrontational, pointed forms that forcibly engage the viewer. Leone d’Oro winner Simone Leigh transforms the American Pavilion into a grass-thatched vernacular structure firmly manifesting the African foundation of American culture. With immense cast bronze sculptures of abstracted female forms as well as more symbolic artworks made from straw mounds, fired clay vessels and cowrie shapes, Leigh presents the bodies of African women as exploited commodities from which American wealth has been extracted. In the Nordic pavilion, three Samì artists present the message that what happens to the Earth, happens to all. The Samì are the last indigenous peoples of Europe whose way of life is threatened by continued Western colonialism. Floating suspended sculptures by Máret Ánne Sara use reindeer body parts, skin and fur manifesting the indivisibility of human, animal and landscape in a world where reindeer are at the heart of Samì cosmology.
In a related exhibition at the Peggy Guggenheim Museum, Surrealism & Magic: Enchanted Modernity, the paintings and sculpture by Surrealists lends a context to the 2022 Biennial theme of “The Milk of Dreams”. Inspired by a children’s story written and illustrated by the artist Leonora Carrington, The Milk of Dreams presents ideas of magic and metamorphosis – concepts at the heart of the Surrealist movement (1920 – 1950s). Typically, it is the work of Max Ernst, Salvador Dalì and Andre Breton that have defined Surrealism however this exhibition presents work by lesser known women painters such as Leonor Fini, Remedios Varo and Leonora Carrington. Curator Gražina Subelytė presents the difference between the male surrealist perception of women subjects as magical beings and female surrealists understanding of women as agents of change. The common message of the surrealists was the combination of alchemy, mysticism and mythology forms an oneiric realm of possibilities in a world where rationalism and logic had brought only extermination and pain.
Other International PavilionsThe Granada Pavilion resonates with the Biennial’s Surrealist theme, The Milk of Dreams, with an installation celebrating an annual performative tradition: Shakespeare Mas. Wearing hand-crafted face coverings, robes and crowns, village men from the Carribean island of Carriacou compete in pairs to be the king of Shakespeare Mas. Hurling lines of Shakespeare plays and sonnets at one another, these actors strive to recite soliloquies from the Bard perfectly. If one contestant mistakes their line or forgets a word, his rival strikes him with a stinging switch. There is an exuberant audience participation and the community prepares costumes and props throughout the year leading up to the event. What makes this traditional game come to life in a Venetian gallery are the exhibition of indigenous costumes, switches, paintings about the competitors and their speeches, as well as digital recordings and videos of the Shakespeare Mas displayed in the gallery.
Shakespeare Mas Installation at the Granada Pavilion
Overall, there is an exuberance to this Biennial as it is the first one since the start of the Pandemic (the last one was three years before in 2019) and the convergence of energy from all over the world buoys the spirit and promotes hopefulness that the world can sometimes be a good place.
Stephen Maine, P22-0199, 2022, 30 x 24”, acrylic on canvas
“What are we looking at and what are we seeing?” That is a question, spoken or not, that pervades the experience of contemporary art. This is particularly true of the sort of art that specializes in eluding obvious imagery and easy explication.
In Stephen Maine’s exhibition of new paintings, we are confronted by the residue of process, a material memory of what was once there. Maine layers a series of off-printings from plates made with modeling paste, extruded foam, and glue. This template is charged with paint that is then transferred to the canvas, in a process similar to a monoprint. But in this case, in a single painting the template carries color in successive printings, resulting in an image that appears as if in dimensional relief.
With their saturated colors, the paintings have a kind of psychedelic, ruined glamour, making a painterly virtue out of the necessity of loss of image’s original source. The paintings play with our continual impulse to seek the meaningful signal in the ambient noise, like making out an image from a stain on a wall, as Leonardo noted in his description of pareidolia.
Stephen Maine, P21-0810, 2022, 50 x 40”, acrylic on canvas
The question of what we are looking at and seeing in these paintings remains the challenge within these works. They rely on our own need for paintings’ intelligibility – to make sense, even as we are immersed in sensuous intensity. These paintings seem to both stimulate and frustrate this desire, through chaos at a remove, a loss of the referent, an appeal to the grotesque.
When we talk about Maine’s work, we cannot help but see it in relation to Richter’s early scintillating procedural abstractions, and to Warhol’s degraded silkscreen tabloid images. Into the mix we can add the work of Simon Hantaï, and his method of pliage, painting folded canvas, that when unfurled yields unanticipated results. And even further back are artists who used the stratagems of automatism, the surrealist technique used to bypass conscious control in hopes accessing a portal to the unconscious. This approach informed Pollock’s inscribing the evidence of his physical movements at a liquid distance from the canvas.
Stephen Maine, P22 0309, 2022, 25 x 20”, acrylic on canvas
All of these artists’ work partakes in a kind of drama wherein the authentic and the automatic continually contend. Maine partakes in this as well, while maintaining a kind of optimistic faith in abstraction’s ability to remain the language of sophisticated discourse, even as it evokes a world in flux, consumed by rupture.
The question of the artifice of art is ever-present in Maine’s work, since we experience a kind of simulacrum of the real, the gesture that is memorialized. The illusion of authenticity persists, as the work appeals to our craving for the spontaneous and the genuine.
Stephen Maine installation view
This desire is put to the test by the artist’s work in the exhibition, with three larger and five smaller works. Two of the paintings are from a single template, in changing color palettes. As a whole, the Maine’s paintings here are in contrast to his work from a number of years ago, with their wall-sized scale and floating, anarchic spirit.
Some of that wildness remains, but a new feeling of organic growth emerges in the branching, linear patterns that structure some of the works. At times, these rib-like elements vibrate in pixilated, buzzing topographies, or alternately devolve into runic entanglements. Also appearing is a new simplicity in a number of the works, with the printed elements announcing themselves with graphic clarity and high-contrast colors on evenly painted grounds.
Stephen Maine: Typologies is at Hionas Gallery, 94 Walker Street, New York from April 21 – May 7, 2022
Luke Gray, Painting on Right Side with Scumble and Brushmarks, 2022, acrylic and screen printing ink on canvas, 27 x 35”
Luke Gray’s intriguing exhibition The Afterlife of Paintings is a meditation on how paintings live on, beyond the private realm of the studio. And in a sense, it is an artist’s enquiry into how he sees the afterlife of his own work, and its relationship to the phenomena of art transformed into a quantum of data projected out into the world.
This series of canvases from 2021-22 is a marked departure from this veteran artist’s previous work. For many years he developed paintings dense with gestural incident, often emerging from passages of darkness. An extended series from the 2010’s featured a grid of spontaneously brushed blocks, like disparate paintings appearing together as if in a digital mash-up.
The works in the exhibition began with painting’s most fundamental starting point, a piece of raw canvas, and an intuitive process. For each painting, Gray selected a few elements: loosely worked rectangles resembling quotations from the artist’s own canvases, painted gestures floating free in empty space, and solid bars of color, recalling components of a minimalist painting.
Luke Gray, Floating Painting with Black and Orange Band on Left Side, and Brushmarks, 2022, acrylic and screen printing ink on canvas, 26 x 24”
Then, by juxtaposing these elements Gray creates for them a new context, a new conceptual space. Suspended in a field of white canvas, the painted rectangles, gestures, and bars are separate from each other, evoking the clarity of design in various print or digital formats. Finally, the elements are further called into question by a line of text that is screen-printed onto the canvas. The text suggests a caption for an image in an article or a wall text for an exhibition.
The combined effect of these interventions launches the individual elements, and the painting as a whole, into an imaginal reality. We are experiencing painting embedded in an actual work of art, and see its possibility of its existing in the world, simultaneously. This approach recalls the writing of Jorge Luis Borges, in which a fictive work of literature become a portal into a labyrinth of speculations about authenticity and existence itself. Gray shares this self-referential combining art and its social context with a number of contemporary artists, such as David Diao and Fred Wilson.
Luke Gray, Homage to Ryder with Floating Black and Yellow Rectangle, Scumble, Brushmarks, and Drip, 2022, 32 x 25”
Through Gray’s work we are seeing painting as both a private and public experience, altered by its presentation, textual information, and the unspoken meanings that are embedded in this process. In this way, the artist posits the contours of a possible “afterlife” as essential to the practice of painting, extending its relevance beyond individual expression into a wider, problematic reality.
Note: This review incorporates a statement that the author wrote for the exhibition.
490 Atlantic gallery is at 490 Atlantic Avenue, Brooklyn, NY on view from April 9 – May 22, 2022
