picks May 19, 2021

Joshua Petker

Flirtation, at its best, is suggestive yet ambiguous, bold yet reticent, playful yet pregnant with meaning. The titular tease in “The Flirt,” Joshua Petker’s new exhibition, may be one of the figures depicted in the twelve dichromatic paintings, but the show’s title could just as easily describe the artist and his fertile imagination.

Petker’s elaborate tableaux of social activity feature libertines, musicians, and fair maidens. In one of the larger canvases on display, Pleading in Blue (all works 2021), a man converses with a woman seated in a chair, while two abstracted apparitions shroud the

picks March 05, 2020

William Brickel

The forlorn figures in William Brickel’s paintings brood in claustrophobic contortions. Their inner lives seem to be as convoluted as their poses, as ambivalent as their mien. As their eyes are almost always looking away from both the viewer and the other men in the scene, they seem to long for something outside the frame. If not alone—and often they appear in pairs or groups—the figures playfully and wistfully wrap around and caress one another with enormous, unwieldy hands.

“If the hands are wrong,” Brickel has said, “then the whole painting doesn’t work.” His fixation on hands stems from their

picks March 04, 2019

Emma Webster

Sir Philip Sidney describes his Arcadia as “so perfect a model of the heavenly dwellings.” For “Arcadia,” her first solo exhibition, Emma Webster showcases painted landscapes of a similarly mythic locus amoenus. These canvases feature 2-D oil renderings of 3-D dioramas that she cobbles together in her studio. The maquettes juxtapose surreal bucolic scenery with clay animal figurines, plastic foliage, and art-historical iconography evoking everything from work by Albert Bierstadt to Francis Bacon, Hieronymus Bosch to John Martin, and Western film backdrops to elementary school arts and crafts.

Tyler Malone