Buster Graybill

AUSTIN MUSEUM OF ART - LAGUNA GLORIA
3809 West 35th Street
November 22–February 19

Buster Graybill, Ramtastic, 2010, still from a color film, 2 minutes.

Buster Graybill’s exhibition “Progeny of Tush Hog” takes advantage of a symbiosis between Minimalist form and the importance of setting in a way that is both playful and smart. In his video Ramtastic, 2010, and a series of photographs, Graybill has animated several polyhedron forms with the intention of observing how the objects could exist in a setting that serves not merely as a backdrop but as an engaged space. His hollow sculptures are fabricated from diamond plate aluminum and other industrial materials, bored with holes that allow corn feed to spill out while various wild game––which populate the pastoral environment––jostle with them as captured on nocturnal cameras. This scenario speaks to the intrusion of urban development into rural settings in a way that is both absurd and poignant. The title comes from the Southern vernacular for a tusked feral hog, but “tush hog” can also refer to a rough-hewn individual who behaves like an animal.

The show presents objects that have been marred by the animal encounter. They silently rest amid the white walls of the gallery space like a gaggle of drunkards proud of their debauched bruises. Nocturnal photographs and video provide evidence of a sort of witches’ Sabbath––Aoudad sheep, for instance, slamming into the forms with juvenile and hedonistic delight.

Graybill is addressing environment in ways that are comical as well as serious, rather than pretentious. This work rides more comfortably in its surroundings than other Minimalist works. While perhaps missing some of the sublimity that that genre traditionally strives for, it conjures up a clever syntax that responds to contemporary issues such as suburban sprawl and “white cube gallery” displacement. His forms speak of an investigation of Minimalism's visual language that can be intimidating to the casual observer and also expand upon the awareness those who are familiar with the genre.

— Garland Fielder

Jean-Luc Moulène

DIA:BEACON
3 Beekman Street
December 1–December 31

Jean-Luc Moulène, Météo (Weather), 2009, plastic hoses, 14 x 25 1/2 x 10 1/4".

Jean-Luc Moulène’s yearlong exhibition “Opus + One” comprises three distinct modules dispersed throughout the vast building. The most beguiling of all is the large gallery of objects titled “Opus,” 1995–. Resting on the floor, hanging from the ceiling, and placed on tables that are so delicate they nearly float in space, thirty-five sculptures––made across the span of sixteen years––fill the cavernous space. The materials, though crude, never quite give themselves away; Lycra resembles liquid glass, water hoses twist and torque into perfect ellipses, and fiberglass takes on the appearance of dehydrated cartilage. No bigger than the human body, or what the human body might be able to cradle, these opuses are propositions rather than determinations, each with its own unique set of terms and conditions. The +1 suffix in the exhibition’s title alludes to this endlessly additive equation, which not only begins at zero, but replicates at the most comprehensible pace possible.

The other galleries take on unique strategies. Two adjoined rooms house Moulène’s photographic series “La Vigie” (Lookout Man), 2004–11, in which two stacked rows (totaling nearly three hundred images) snake around the walls. They picture the same rogue weed––sprouted from a Parisian sidewalk in front of the country’s Ministry for the Economy, Industry, and Employment––as it blooms and retreats in a hostile environment over many years. In the back gallery, a large, opalescent aluminum sculpture, titled Body, 2011, stands alone. Built to order by Renault, the piece takes a smaller opus made by Moulène and enlarges it to the power of several hundred. While its leguminous figure and hyper-glossed surface are sexy, the overall slickness of the form is counterproductive to Moulène’s project: His art is most successful when the work teeters at the brink of potential and failure, as structural models that will never quite be realized.

— Carmen Winant

Sharon Hayes

THE ART INSTITUTE OF CHICAGO
111 South Michigan Avenue
November 10–March 11

Sharon Hayes, Parole, 2010, still from HD single-channel video, 36 minutes.

Love, like politics, longs to speak through us, and we, reciprocally, long to be heard and to speak: to feel as though on some basic level our hopes, fears, and desires register somewhere amid the forces that bind us to history and to one another. Sharon Hayes’s work negotiates this territory while effectively disrupting the amalgamation of public and private identities. Her practice affords us a pause to reflect on the meaning of the classic feminist slogan “The personal is political”—both in a general sense and also, more specifically, in relation to LGBT rights today.

In Hayes’s solo exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago, curated by Lisa Dorin, we are presented with a tripartite show that includes Parole, 2010, first exhibited in the Whitney Biennial; In the Near Future, 2005–2009; and An Ear to the Sounds of Our History, 2011. Together, the pieces are more than the sum of their parts, and they reveal an artist working through various modalities of publicness in order to find the self and selves, authentic or otherwise. In the four-channel video installation Parole, actress Becca Blackwell proffers a countenance that is a near-blank slate; equipped with a microphone, she performs the work of a quasi-psychoanalyst probing the world. Through vignettes of her listening in the street, a classroom, her apartment, and a dance studio, the viewer is left to ponder how these encounters affect or construct her and, by extension, ourselves.

Hayes’s references and source materials here include James Baldwin’s 1974 lecture at Berkeley, Lauren Berlant’s theorization of sentimentality, a 1904 Anna Rüling speech, a dancer rehearsing, and Hayes’s own declarations of love. Throughout this exhibition, the audience is made to feel privy to that which, taken collectively, might be best characterized as a type of prayer—one that is spoken against the odds that it will ever be answered but perseveres all the same, defiant in its resignation

— Zachary Cahill

Fernando Mastrangelo

CHAREST-WEINBERG
250 NW 23rd Street #408
November 29–February 29

Fernando Mastrangelo, Stella (2), 2011, gunpowder, 10' 1 1/2" x 7' 1" x 2".

Fernando Mastrangelo has spent the past few years condensing powders into bricks of social critique. He pressed corn meal pressed into an Aztec calendar criticizing NAFTA. Human ash became MS-13 gang tattoos in a blend of violence and religious iconography. Seventy thousand dollars’ worth of cocaine became a sculpture of life-size Colombian coca farmer Felix, 2009. All of these represent an exact pairing of content and meaning, and a direct relationship between the piece and how it should be understood. Now, in a look back at the cold war’s existential dread and ideological infighting, Mastrangelo presents “Black Sculpture”—three-dimensional renderings of work by Frank Stella and Ad Reinhardt cast from compressed gunpowder.

The sculptures aren’t a precise chromatic black. A close look reveals subtle gradation and crystallization in the gunpowder, itself on the precipice of a bright flash and cloud of smoke. As such, Mastrangelo’s black hues primarily relate to their cultural connotation: negation. While not overly necrotic, they do present the act of painting today as a destructive, or at least disruptive, process. Is black the lack of information, as in a blackout, or is it the product of every piece of information ever, printed line upon line until the paper becomes a solid textual wall (everything) and a void (nothing)? Whereas with Wade Guyton, for instance, the black of an Epson printer is both painterly information and our ability to communicate it, Mastrangelo’s monochrome, in turn, connotes the height of modernist dogma—a complete flow of Greenbergian thought and the seizure of contrary opinion. His use of incendiary material only increases the tension between something and nothing.

One can easily compare the warring camps of modernity and cold war diplomacy, especially when one considers the role of CIA patronage in that chapter of American artmaking. As such, gunpowder is an apt medium to reflect this tumultuous period. If black signifies both everything and nothing, information and its transmission, it also represents historical lineage and its abdication. These sculptures are both in line with midcentury heroics (a virtue often found on the battlefield) and combatively at odds with the summoned past.

— Hunter Braithwaite

Laurent Grasso

BASS MUSEUM OF ART
2100 Collins Avenue
October 29–February 12

Lately, the Bass Museum of Art has been asking contemporary artists to produce exhibitions that incorporate the museum’s collection of Renaissance and Baroque art. In this iteration, “Portrait of a Young Man,” Laurent Grasso has taken up questions of authorship and lineage by hiring a group of art restorers to create compositions based on visual notes of Fra Angelico, Mantegna, and Botticelli. These new pieces are then tagged with elements from Grasso’s work. Studies into the Past, No. 2, 2011, for example, features a cloud engulfing a Flemish city identical to the one in Grasso’s Projection, 2003, while the title references a fifteenth-century Botticini oil on display in a room nearby.

Remarkably, the show isn’t self-serving: Grasso superimposes his work on the agreed-upon body of art history as a way of ridiculing larger institutional modes. One of his well-known videos, Les Oiseaux, 2008, is shown on a campy—aerodynamic, pea-soup green—television model from the 1960s. The work, which shows a flock of starlings weaving above the Vatican, usually outpaces the cynical viewer’s reaction to the trite subject matter through its cinematic grace. But on the small screen, it underwhelms, a nod toward inevitable curatorial missteps. That said, much of the show is concerned with scientific exploration: A drawing by Galileo is re-created in neon lights, and the microwave receiver used in 1964 to confirm the big bang theory is reconstructed with wood and foil to form the painfully analog piece Horn Antenna, 2011. By collapsing the contemporary and the archaic, Grasso imagines scientific inquiry not as a linear progression but as a recursive reinterpretation of previously held ideas. The museum similarly evolves from an eccentric nineteenth-century Wunderkammer to a tightly administered space and then to the nebulous halls of cyberspace.

Derrida argued that the archive, by being about the past, should “call into question the coming of the future.” Indeed, the Bass Museum begins to resemble Back to the Future as Grasso, like Marty McFly attempting to keep his parents together, fiddles with the past in order to secure his stature as an institution-friendly artist on the international circuit. Finally, it’s location that saves the show from the fate of the Ouroboros. Since Miami, a city with a population either on vacation or en exilio, is notoriously ahistorical, it’s only fitting to approach the Bass’s Renaissance art holdings by way of another South Beach standard: the remix.

— Hunter Braithwaite

“Absentee Landlord”

WALKER ART CENTER
1750 Hennepin Avenue
June 11–July 29

View of “Absentee Landlord,” 2011. From left: Donald Moffett, Lot 091195.03, 1995/2003; Jack Pierson, Silver Jackie with Pink Spot, 1991; Jess Von der Ahe, Helmut Berger as Ludwig II, 2006; Willem de Kooning, Woman, ca. 1952.

If we consider the title “Absentee Landlord,” we might get the suspicion that this exhibition foregrounds its curator, John Waters. And in many ways it does. Invited by the Walker to rearrange its permanent collection, Waters works from the premise that “the entire museum-going experience is in need of intervention.”

The conceit of the show is that Waters is the landlord, the galleries are rental apartments, and the eighty or so artworks are the tenants. As a whole it stands as a witty iteration of institutional critique; the curatorial structuring is reflexive, and the architectural interventions are site-specific. Visitors who dial up the audio tour can listen to Waters describe the works on view in pig latin—his comic riposte to the obscurity of critical jargon. Such considered irreverence, the curator’s signature, is repeated throughout the exhibition in a series of low blows, as in the glory hole he drilled in the men’s bathroom, or in his decision to hang de Kooning’s Woman, ca. 1952, just inches off the ground. Above and to the left of it, at eye level, is the small painting by Jess von der Ahe titled Helmut Berger as Ludwig II, 2006, which depicts a passive-looking man, swooning in bed. The artist painted it with her own menstrual blood. Shot, reverse shot.

Counterpoints like this predominate, often with the display of works by Waters himself. As he does in his films, here too as an artist-curator he activates the low as a space from which to sully the profundity of others, to give us pause, to make us laugh. Posing saucy juxtapositions and offbeat questions, he encourages us to think about art history in novel ways, and leaves us with the provocation: “Can artworks sexually attract each other? Does Minimalism make Pop horny?”

— Jonathan Thomas

Rachel Jones

THE FRONT
4100 St. Claude Avenue
January 14–February 10

Rachel Jones, Memento Mori, 2012, oil on plastic, 25 x 23". Installation view.

Remember your mortality. Rachel Jones’s exhibition “Memento Mori” reworks the bulwark of art-historical iconography associated with this phrase into an absorbing display of postmodern devotion infused with reincarnations of romanticism. The show’s title painting reveals a funereal floral display of golden mums, pastel pink azaleas, and a variety of other flowers that incorporate areas of fuchsia, green, and taupe. Below the image, in altarlike fashion, sit several lit candles on a simple white shelf. The fleeting beauty of a bouquet underscored by the diminishing flames sets the tone for an exhibition of contemporary vanitas. In Nothing Will Be as Before, 2012, an animal pelt sprawled out on a sea of white is highly reminiscent of Courbet’s Fox in the Snow (another memento mori incarnation). Nature continues its course in This Will Go On Long After Us, 2011, as a singular bolt of lightning sets a tree afire in the foreground, illuminating the night sky.

With one exception, each piece instantiates the artist’s style of thickly painted oil on thin plastic affixed directly to the wall, providing a palpable surface tension between the highly charged painting and the void of the wall. The anomaly—Untitled, 2012—is a bold break that nonetheless pays tribute to past methods: A diamond-shaped piece of brightly painted plastic reverently rests atop a pile of blackened flowers. Nearby is We Are Free, 2011, a 6 x 6” square, one-third of it nicely bent at a right angle so that it straddles two adjacent walls forming a corner. Within its edges, galactic speckles sitting on a black background cleverly invert the void of the wall’s white expanse with its paradoxically tiny cosmic window.

As each piece contains intense narratives, worlds in and of themselves, Jones creates an altogether arresting and thoughtful assembly ardently reminding the viewer to live life deeply.

— Natalie Sciortino-Rinehart

“The Workers”

MASSACHUSETTS MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART (MASS MOCA)
87 Marshall Street
May 29–March 15

Oded Hirsch, Tochka, 2010, still from a single-channel video, 14 minutes 20 seconds.

In Oded Hirsch’s fourteen-minute video Tochka, 2010, a dozen men build a rickety bridge across a shallow gorge in a lush green landscape. Dressed in blue workmen’s uniforms with white hats pulled low over their eyes and yellow buckets strung from their hips, the men toil with a ridiculous assortment of tools and materials––sticks, shovels, mud, rope, an enormous steel spool––to create a contraption that looks more like a medieval catapult than a practical overpass and which, in the end, nearly collapses when they cross. One of the more striking pieces in this ten-month-long exhibition on the pleasures, sorrows, and increasingly precarious conditions of work, Tochka also offers the most poetic interpretation of the show’s multiple and competing themes.

“The Workers” is an expanded version of an earlier show, “En cada instante, ruptura” (In Every Instant, Rupture), curated by Carla Herrera-Prats for the Sale de Arte Público Siqueiros in Mexico City. While the previous project focused on the strategies to which artists are turning to render visible the devastating changes to the landscape of labor, the current exhibition, curated by Herrera-Prats and MASS MoCA’s Susan Cross, not only illustrates but also embodies how people work (piecemeal) today. With admirable modesty and impressive subtlety, “The Workers” narrows the gap between artists and workers who would otherwise eye each other suspiciously across a chasm of privilege, complicity, or purity of purpose. From the artists Emily Jacir and Mircea Cantor documenting ephemeral, high-stakes action to the day laborers in Adrian Paci’s Centro di Permanenza Temporanea (Detention Center), 2007, and from the street vendors in Oliver Ressler’s Socialism Failed, Capitalism Is Bankrupt. What Comes Next?, 2010, to the factory workers who collaborated with Vicky Funari and Sergio De La Torre to create Maquilapolis, 2006, there is common cause among members of the new global “precariat,” whether they come from manufacturing, the knowledge economy, or the wageless workforce of contemporary art.

Hirsch’s bridge in Tochka––crafty, nostalgic, highly inefficient yet still somehow emancipatory and sublime––provides an apt metaphor for the exhibition, in which we see the confluence of the creative and collaborative process and the labor of art at large. More concretely, works by Mary Lum, Camel Collective, and Laboratorio 060 address the history of the site––down to the last labor contract negotiated there––and MASS MoCA’s ambiguous role in turning a former factory town into a tourist destination. Maybe because the exhibition is up for so long, it has created an interesting, albeit distant, echo chamber, coinciding with the New Museum’s exhibition “Ostalgia,” e-flux’s reader Are You Working Too Much?, and Ross Perlin’s book Intern Nation, to say nothing of the convergence of the so-called Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street, all of which are rooted in unemployment and exploitation. In the exhibition’s forthcoming catalogue, the curators and the labor historian Andrew Ross issue tentative calls for greater political mobilization and collective action. They may see them answered sooner, and louder, than any of us thought.

— Kaelen Wilson-Goldie

Jerzy Janiszewski

CHARLES KRAUSE | REPORTING FINE ART
1300 13th Street NW, Suite 105
December 9–February 14

Jerzy Janiszewski, Sequence4: collage, 2009, Marlboro cigarette packaging, 39 5/8 x 27 3/4”.

Three of the twenty-five works in Jerzy Janiszewski’s first solo exhibition feature the logo he designed for the Solidarity trade union movement in 1980, which ignited opposition against the Polish communist government and eventually led to its downfall. Inspired by graffiti from the Gdansk shipyards and written in a font Janiszewski devised specially for the movement, with a Polish flag rising from the N, the sign’s rawly drawn red lettering has lost none of its capacity to strike. On view is the first imprint of the design, signed by Solidarity leader Lech Walesa, as well as a poster from the movement’s first national protest—which Janiszewski had a friend bury in the ground for seven years to protect it from the police—and a painted version of the logo that the artist made in the 1990s.

Equally compelling are the mixed-media collages from Janiszewski’s thirty-year exile working as a graphic designer in Paris and Barcelona that make up the bulk of the show. The works consist of paper bric-a-brac Janiszewski accumulated in his studio and arranged in intricate patterns; it should be noted that he had no intention of showing the works until this exhibition. Altogether, 2008, and the two series “Sequence,” 2008–2009, and “Parallels,” 2008, are made of carefully torn pieces of Marlboro cigarette packets, while Gazeta, 1996, and Secret Message, 1994, make semiabstractions from newspapers and other discarded printed material. It’s curious that an artist famous for giving a word visual resonance should be interested in pure abstraction and divorcing graphic letters from their meaning, but the paradox holds. Janiszewski never stagnated in the communist-specific tropes that plagued so many Soviet bloc émigré artists, reveling instead in the purely visual sensibility that made his logo a success. His collages are underscored by the same verve for color—red above all—and illusory kinetic qualities that drive his graphic work. Their origins are just as prosaic: The materials were all Janiszewski could afford at the time, and he made of them what he could.

— Max Seddon

Harry Callahan

THE NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART
Sixth Street and Constitution Avenue, NW
October 2–March 4

Harry Callahan, Detroit, 1943, black-and-white photograph, 3 1/4 x 4 5/16".

Harry Callahan began making photographs in 1938, at the age of twenty-six, teaching himself to use a camera while working as an accounting clerk for General Motors in Detroit. The one hundred–some photographs brought together in honor of the upcoming centenary of his birth (in 1912) represent six decades of informal, yet iconic, portraits of America. Despite the unavoidably nostalgic imagery of Callahan’s early streetscapes and quotidian scenes (ladies in gloves, men in hats, classic cars), his photographs are remarkably timeless. Their freshness owes to Callahan’s consistent experimentation, both technically (the ways he manipulated film in the camera and darkroom) and conceptually (the subjects he chose and how he depicted them.) Throughout his career Callahan toggled between realism and abstraction, integrating elements of both genres in his most arresting photographs.

Callahan’s earliest works reveal the combined impact of two major influences: Laszlo Moholy-Nagy (who eventually hired Callahan to teach at the Institute of Design in Chicago) and Ansel Adams. Like Moholy-Nagy, Callahan experimented with multiple exposures to create surrealist cinematic effects. In a more extreme example of abstraction, Camera Movement on Flashlight, 1946–47, Callahan uses pure light to achieve painterly streaks. Adams’s influence, on the other hand, comes across in Callahan’s near-religious reverence for nature’s perfection. In Grasses, 1950, which depicts a snow-covered lawn, Callahan celebrates the graceful form of individual blades of grass. Here Callahan also plays with scale and composition, making it initially hard to identify the black spears that starkly contrast the bright white field.

The heart and soul of this show (and arguably of Callahan’s oeuvre) are the portraits of his wife and unfailing muse, Eleanor. In Callahan’s photographs she appears posed and candid; up close and from afar; nude at home and in her street clothes shopping in downtown Chicago. The gallery dedicated to Eleanor is a love letter to the artist’s domestic life and also represents the apogee of his hybrid abstract-surrealist-realist style. From straightforward head shots to ghostly double exposures to abstract formal studies of light, shadow, and line, Callahan captures not only his wife’s physical likeness but her spiritual essence.

— Mara Hoberman

“Preternatural”

CANADIAN MUSEUM OF NATURE
240 McLeod Street
December 9–March 4

Marie-Jeanne Musiol, The Radiant Forest, 2011, electromagnetic photographic installation, back-lit positives, in two modules of 16 x 96" each. Installation view.

In “Preternatural,” curator Celina Jeffery addresses ways that contemporary art constructs epistemologies beyond the scientific; in so doing, she offers compelling counterexamples to the disconnect between spirituality and contemporary art that art historian James Elkins has observed. Fittingly for a show about unconventional perceptions, this exhibition is framed within three idiosyncratic spaces: a deconsecrated Catholic church, a gallery in a strip mall, and a natural history museum.

A performance installation at St. Brigid’s Centre for the Arts brings to mind spirit photography— Adrian Göllner conjured fleeting spectral emanations in Handel’s Cloud, 2011, an installation-performance (mounted in December) in which fog rushed from gothic vaulting. Equally elusive, the Patrick Mikhail Gallery’s white box space is interrupted only by the pressed lines of Shin il Kim’s Invisible Masterpiece, 2011. Embossed figure-outlines on colorless paper are animated in a three-channel video that shows these barely perceptible traces becoming even more ghostly as immaterial projections.

At the Canadian Museum of Nature, the artists focus on the sensuality and the sense of wonder in science. Sarah Walko’s installation It is very least what one ever sees, 2011, exists where scientific organization intersects with devotional practice, poetry, and romance. Wall-mounted test tubes become reliquaries for colorful collections of found objects, including bones, feathers, and text, all arranged according to Walko’s personal taxonomy. Live fish and plants in a central biosphere counter the dead, arranged objects. Through Nox Borealis, 2011, Andrew Wright rewrites the natural history diorama in “full-scale” photographic prints mounted on concave supports. His inverted arctic images purposefully disorient viewers; we aren’t exactly sure whether we are looking at minimal sculpture, snow, a heavenly cloudscape, or the lunar surface. In this confusion, he evokes the awe and terror of the arctic night—an environment without landmarks. Marie-Jeanne Musiol, a true believer in human spiritual potential, shows works that are far subtler but no less sublime. She displays electrophotographic light images of leaves—objective evidence of auratic energies discussed in Buddhism, Theosophy, and Scientology. In The Radiant Forest, 2011, she presents small transparencies backlit by a mysterious, dim bioluminescence that “develops” on viewers’ retinas—a metaphoric and demonstrative energy transference. Her works best manifest the exhibition’s theme of extraordinary natural experience.

This exhibition is also on view at St. Brigid’s Centre for the Arts, 302 St. Patrick Street, until February 17.

— William Ganis

“Coming After”

THE POWER PLANT CONTEMPORARY ART GALLERY
231 Queens Quay West
December 10–March 4

Glen Fogel, Glen from Colorado, 2009, fluorescent lights on powder-coated steel, MP3 player, motion detector, solid state relay, variac, amplifier, speaker, powder-coated steel chair, 100 x 48”.

Spanning installation, drawing, photography, performance, and video, this ambitious exhibition brings together sixteen artists—almost all of whom were born after 1970—whose works reflect on the period of queer radicalism witnessed in North America from the 1980s through the ’90s. Meditating on themes of nostalgia, loss, and latency, the show consistently evokes a feeling of having arrived too late to directly participate in this traumatic but galvanizing political moment.

Curator Jon Davies opens the show with a smartly selected group of video works that link past cultural icons with contemporary queer politics. Aleesa Cohene’s video installation Yes, Angel, 2011, presents a carefully constructed narrative of two intergenerational queer relationships using clips culled from melodramatic films of the 1980s; mobilizing metaphors of contagion that circulated during the AIDS crisis, the piece hints at ways in which complex emotional states are transferred from older queer generations to younger ones, suggesting that affects, like diseases, might be spread through contact transmission. Other works take a queer look at the art history canon; James Richards’s Untitled merchandise (lovers and dealers), 2007, for instance, is a collection of six knitted blankets that depict the names of Keith Haring’s lovers (in pink and blue) and art dealers (in red and yellow). See also Jonathan VanDyke’s performance Obstructed View, 2011, which makes the implicit homoeroticism of much AbEx painting into a blatantly sexual but surprisingly poetic encounter between two men on a locker room bench.

Operating as a coda to these works, which explicitly reflect on the past, the second floor of the exhibition offers a more lyrical take on present queer relationships. Among them is Glen Fogel’s 2009 installation Glen from Colorado, which features a minimalist fluorescent light sculpture in the shape of the name “Glen” that pulses with light in time with the intonations of a robotic voice that dispassionately reads excerpts from letters the artist has received from friends and lovers, at times laudatory and at others, accusatory and cold.

— Gabrielle Moser

Damian Moppett

RENNIE COLLECTION
51 East Pender Street
November 26–April 21

Damian Moppett, Artforum with Mike Kelley's 'Foul Perfection: Thoughts on Caricature', 2003, graphite on paper, 10 x 10".

Call it a hometown coup for Damian Moppett. In the fall of 2009, Bob Rennie, a Vancouver-based collector, real estate marketer, and chair of the North American acquisitions committee for the Tate, opened the eponymous Rennie Collection in Vancouver’s Chinatown to display his private collection, one of the largest in North America. This fall, of the forty artists Rennie collects in depth, Moppett became the first Canadian artist to have an exhibition in the gallery.

Moppett’s representational drawings and paintings are deceptive because the subject of his work is not what is depicted. Viewed all together, these images suggest a meaning that develops through the juxtaposition of the various people and places. In one room, for example, the walls are cluttered with small-scale paintings and drawings, salon style. Their subjects differ: portraits of artists, such as Calder with Maquette of Public Sculpture (all works cited 2005), or Hollis Frampton in His Wittgenstein T-Shirt; scenes of bands performing; vignettes of the Gulf Islands; studies of sculptures in an artist’s studio, like Studio in Basement. What seems to develop, at first, is a portrait of the artist, a mixture of influences and autobiography, all removed from context. However, if this is self-hagiography, there is a certain humor to it. In the middle of the same room in the Rennie Collection appears one of Moppett’s “Stabiles,” reworkings of Alexander Calder and Anthony Caro sculptures that serve as platforms on which Moppett displays his intentionally bad pottery. Further, one notices that some of paintings depict the objects in the gallery. As such, Moppett’s work often refers to its own making, but the absurdity of presenting high modernist sculpture next to amateur craft also suggests parody, or at least humor. Whether the work mythologizes or criticizes the autonomous artist is left ambiguous; it’s never funny enough to be just a joke.

— Aaron Peck