Katie Anania

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  picks September 13, 2009

  “Polymict”

  “Polymict” is a small exhibition, and its component works in Okay Mountain’s garage space feel distilled, as though melted down to make an elixir. Enter the word polymict, a geologic space composed of layers of rock from different sources. Curator Nathan Green installed half the show (five paintings each by Logan Grider and Ludwig Schwarz), and then invited Warren Aldrich and Lillian Gerson to build an installation that responds to the canvases. Green complicates the motif of geologic layering with the idea of layers in general, placing Grider and Schwarz’s bright abstract works along three

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  picks August 02, 2009

  Francisco Matto

  “The Modern and the Mythic: Francisco Matto” shows one of Joaquín Torres-Garcia’s most commercially successful students to also be one of the most resonant, though curator Gabriel Perez-Barreiro goes out of his way to disprove the existence of a causal relationship between the former and the latter. Matto’s economical use of forms and strokes, which remained constant from the 1940s to the ’90s, refreshingly obfuscates any narrative of stylistic development. To illustrate the cohesiveness of Matto’s oeuvre, the show wends through several clusters of galleries—some exhibiting vertical two-dimensional

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  picks June 18, 2009

  “Practice, Practice, Practice”

  In “Practice, Practice, Practice,” artist Michael Smith and curator Jay Sanders reformulate the comedic punch line into a unit: the number three, a pedagogy shared by Jasper Johns (“Take an object. Do something to it. Do something else to it”). The abruptness of these ideas betrays the exhibition’s second premise: that artistic practice is tantamount to banal repetition punctuated by accidentally interesting moments, enfeebling the modernist myth of making. Wedged into the gallery space are works by twenty-six artists that explore comedic processes––feigned expertise, futility, zeal, consonance,