Vicky Wright’s exhibition “Night Shift” was articulated in two distinct parts. The gallery’s compact ground-floor space was devoted to an installation of wall-mounted figurative paper sculptures along with some drawings, titled five parts MACHINE, one of DESIRE (perpetuates a self-replicating monadic structure) (all works 2017), whose composition served in part to draw the viewer toward the stairwell leading to the more extensive basement level, which housed seven paintings. The ground-floor installation featured a pair of abstracted, comically elongated figures, apparently male, constructed out of sections of sewing patterns held together with brass pins—soft reliefs: not so much clothes make the man as making clothes makes the man. One was three-legged and headless, and held up an unrolled sheet of paper to which it gestured with a pointer: a scene of instruction. The other, standing with the nonchalant posture familiar from a million fashion illustrations, extended an absurdly long arm to dangle a sequence of collar patterns down the wall of the stairwell. Next to this figure hovered a fragment of another, identifiable by the breastlike forms appended to her as female and unclothed.

The canvases downstairs, with a few exceptions, were redolent of Analytical Cubism. This was true not only of the works’ coloration—a subdued, at times nearly grisaille, palette of grays and earth tones—but also of their compositional approach, which was based on a concatenation of representational fragments in a shallow space. Rather than investigating visual language, however, this self-consciously retro pictorial idiom evoked subjective experience; the paintings suggested a fractured and reconstructed self. This approach was particularly evident in Doppler-Effect, with its uncanny pair of eyes surrounded by swirls of paint, threadlike lines, and hands in motion, a painting that looks as if it were trying to piece itself together out of random parts under its own demanding gaze. Yes, the eyes somehow appear to be looking at the painting that contains them rather than at the viewer facing them; that’s what gives the work its eerie feeling. Likewise, the eye near the center of The Absent Face—Where Are You? VI uncannily seemed not to be the eye of the ghostly head in profile, a subtle cloud shape of pale-blue paint on the verge of either dispersing or coalescing.

Connected to the exhibition was a backstory that could not be gleaned from the works themselves. The press release explained that the exhibition’s “subject and protagonist is the artist’s grandmother, a war widow who took to work as a weaver in a mill.” At night, she labored in her kitchen to replicate high-style dresses for her own use, seeking thereby “to connect with illusory and remote visions, a place where she could channel loss and yearning through projections of beauty and hope.” Ultimately, it’s hard not to wonder whether Wright’s empathetic meditation on her grandmother’s plight—the mismatch between the infinite of her desire and the restrictions imposed by circumstance—isn’t an attempt to come to terms with her own (or anyone’s) situation as an artist in a disappointing present. Is creation merely a consolation for frustrated yearnings? The answer seems to be that whatever keeps desire alive is worth hanging onto. “Projections of beauty and hope” are their own reward, and all the more necessary the more firmly life’s restrictions hem us in. Or such is the somber reassurance with which “Night Shift” leaves us.

—Barry Schwabsky