“That’s Not Right”
- Eye Level
- 9 hours ago
- 8 min read
Those who didn’t get into the juried showcase at the 14C Art Fair pool their perturbances and tortured visions
Art fairs, I have learned, are a little bit like the senior prom. They might not be your idea of a good time. But you don’t want to be stuck at home while everybody else is on the dancefloor. Even if you don’t party, it’s still nice to be asked.
The organizers of our own homegrown Fair have always been good chaperones, and that is, in part, because they’ve never denied this. They understand the power that comes from exclusion, and they’ve tried to be humble about it, even though in the long run, it’s impossible to be. With each Art Fair 14C — our sixth opens this spring — the scorecard gets more complicated. Fair number five devoted an entire chamber of an old train station to independent New Jersey artists. The best stuff at the Fair hung in that room. This year, with no rail terminal at its disposal, 14C has cut the size of the showcase substantially: only sixteen participants have been selected by the jury of three. Many artists who’ve already distinguished themselves at Art Fair 14C will be on the outside looking in.
Some of them will be an elevator ride away. “That’s Not Right” gathers work from a score of artists who weren’t picked for the big show upstairs. This coalition of the uninvited is happening in the big gallery on the second floor of the warehouse building at 150 Bay St.*, and it’ll be there until June 22, long after the Art Fair 14C has concluded its business on floor number four. Call it a Salon des Refuses if you like, but the proximity of the rest of 14C makes it feel more like an overflow exhibition. Other than space, there really isn’t any reason that the artists in “That’s Not Right” aren’t part of the Fair.
The organizers of 14C call this show “That’s Not Right” because of a common disquiet that ripples through these painting. The participants have contributed pieces that feel a little off: either something untoward is happening in them, or the color choices are idiosyncratic, or the work feels incomplete or distressed. But the name of the exhibition is also an acknowledgment of the arbitrariness of the choices and the weird feeling of drawing rights lines across the surface of a community as tight as this one is — one rarely graced by a velvet rope.
For instance, it’s hard to imagine the rationale for excluding Deborah Pohl from the showcase. No independent artist in New Jersey conjures communicative effects from oil paint any better than she does, and nobody approaches art history with a better sense of humor. Pohl works small — small enough that there’s bound to be a place in a big show where her work can be tucked. “Plushie Vanitas,” one of her pieces in “That’s Not Right,” is barely larger than a sheet of poster paper. Nevertheless, it says plenty. It’s a still life on a chalk-gray background with two characters: a stuffed-vegetable avocado, complete with a smiley face, and a human skull.
As is often the case in Pohl’s paintings, she shows off her chops a little, capturing the folds of the plush fabric around the avocado’s pit-belly, and the gradient color in the recesses of the skull’s eye sockets. Mostly, though, she lets her two creations establish their own relationship. The avocado leans blithely on the skull’s crown; if it had an arm to throw around its bony buddy, you sense it would. Meanwhile, the skull is impassive, and maybe a bit glowering, too. The effect is more than a wry commentary on the memento mori. It’s a riff on the enormous difference between how we see ourselves and what we actually are. We like the avocado so much better than the skull that we’re forced to ask ourselves: why do we identify with the factory-made object rather than the organic one? Why does the avocado seem like a friend and the skull an enemy?
Kathleen Beausoleil’s work prompts similar questions. Her audacious practice of saturating her summertime scenes with bright pink undercolor made her one of the breakout stars of 14C Art Fair number five. (Well, at least for me.) You’d think that scenes tinted the color of fiberglass would be bossy — tricky to endure for more than a few moments. They do catch the eye and demand attention. But the depth of her characterization in her oil paintings rewards protracted engagement. Beausoleil’s work shows fun and is fun, even as it suggests that that fun might be morphing into something else.
The organizers of 14C have given “Candy Wheel” pride of place in “That’s Not Right.” It greets visitors by the gallery door. As a summary of a subtly fraught scenario, it’s meant to be representative of the rest of the work inside. Visible in this depiction of a moment of suspense at a fairground are the seeds of a different kind of story.
We don’t see the carnival barker, but he’s spun a prize wheel, and everybody at the midway is either trying not to follow it, or they’re transfixed by it. In the foreground are a group of kids, arms crossed, or cheering on gravity and friction, or eating their ice cream absently as they learn whether or not they’re the lucky ones. A young boy with his hands on his head could be at the track, or selling stock on the NYSE floor. We can almost hear the pauses between the ticks of the strokes increasing as the wheel slows and settles on a result. Meanwhile, the grownups in the background supervise the scene warily, conscious of the volcanic emotions of youth, but also aware of the predictive significance we place on games of chance. Who will be fortunate, and who will be cut out? The stakes are higher than they seem.
How was it that the Art Fair 14C judges didn’t feel them? Perhaps it’s because they represent galleries in Manhattan: Peter Freeman, Marlborough, Hashimoto Contemporary. New Yorkers, I’ve noticed, are simply not as adept at handling irony as New Jersey people are. This is particularly true in the so-called art world, where professionals don’t believe that viewers will take the time to look hard at paintings and see narrative ambiguity. They understand sensation, but not storytelling. Yet the very best visual art exists in context. The best pictures imply a past and a future, and create reverberations that go beyond the frame.
Also, they do what they do amidst a sea of referent. Kristin Künc, an excellent visual storyteller, names her oil painting after a poem by Sylvia Plath that contrasts the trajectories of a rueful woman devoted to motherhood and another ruined by intellectual pursuits. “Two Sisters of Persephone” is, like much of “That’s Not Right,” productively ambiguous. Künc shows us two girls, and it’s up to us to figure out which is which, or whether they’re split halves of the same consciousness.
Likewise, Jane Westrick’s hallucinatory “Slide,” a mixed-media piece on a huge sheet of paper, both invites and resists interpretation. Two faceless human figures set themselves and grab another person by the wrists. They’re either helping the third character to his feet or giving him the heave-ho. There’s something aggressive about the piece, but it also feels choreographed — like the man on the floor might be complicit in his own dismissal. The three figures appear to be on a threshold between rooms, or spaces, but it’s impossible to tell if they’re on the outside coming in, the inside going out, or in permanent transition. Everything is sliding between states, blurred out, yoked to its own afterimage, engaged in a play between past and future, action and consequence.
The featureless bodies in Westrick’s painting are designed for the viewer to inhabit. There’s no impediment to our identification with them: depending on our mood, we can slide right into the role of the person getting tossed or the people doing the tossing. Teague Smith turns a similar trick in “Chinese Takeout,” an acrylic painting that chronicles a moment of mutual recognition between a short-order cook and a bicycle delivery person. The blank-faced man behind the counter holds high a plastic bag, and the messenger, index finger raised, reaches for it like he’s throwing a punch. There are other people in the Chinese restaurant, too, roughly painted, hunched over their table and fishing food out of paper cartons with chopsticks. Beyond the glass panel windows are refractions from the city at night, streaks of light, squiggles of color, ghostly shapes, a mood of wetness and slick tarmac. The cook and his food seem to form a single gesture, and the deliveryman is mainly smoke. What matters is the urgency of the proletarian scene: the need to get back on the bike and bring dinner to the orderer as quickly as possible, and the endless demands of the city’s appetites. This is a real thing that Smith is showing us — a scene that’s played out over and over, every night, a negotiation between the workers who make dinner as fast as they can, the cyclists who bring it to its destination as fast as they can, and the hungry person who, unseen and elsewhere ensconced, puts this dinnertime drama in motion.
Only when the meaning of a painting is too obvious does the narrative magic fray at the edges. In Vera Khodakova Blanco’s oil painting “Show,” a naked woman elevates her ass for the inspection of six mirthless, blue-faced businessmen in suits with the loose fit of judicial robes. It certainly makes its point, but it lacks the mystery that makes other pieces in this show so engrossing. More intriguing is “Seeds of Riot,” an acrylic painting by the Iranian-American artist Saina Moazami. Three grim-faced figures — likely a mother, a father, and a child — cling to each other. The artist has emphasized their verticality, elongating their necks and faces, and shrouding half of their heads in shadow. They appear to have been stretched like taffy. Flashes of red in their tan-colored skin reinforce the impression that these people are under extreme duress. We’re not shown where they are or where they’re going (though it certainly feels like they’re on the move), but Moazami gives us a clue, and testifies to her interest in literature and storytelling. In English and Parsi, she paints an open-ended poem directly on to the canvas. Their existence is framed by words.
To look at the people in “Seeds of Riot” is to feel for them, even if we don’t know exactly what’s wrong. Not-rightness can be a little harder to detect when there are no human beings in a piece. From a certain perspective, Michael Wolf’s “Reclaimed” is a harmonious object: a branch, exploding like an antler, from the roof of a little house made of slate. The contrast between the rough organic texture of the wood and the coolness of the stone drives the dynamism of the piece — but so does the shadow of the branch, shattering the white of the gallery wall and whispering that all is not right inside that tiny home.
But for sheer ominousness, the artist to see is John Di Lorenzo. “Convergent Depths” is all gloom and veiled threats: a staircase leading to a darkened basement with a blood red floor and an open door. In “South Shore Phantom Limb,” he augments his dark acrylic paint with inked lines and streaks on the panel that look as if pigment has been scraped away. On a pier, over the ocean, a single figure — more a shadow than a man — stares out at this vast erasure. There’s a powerful sense of separation in the piece, and a subterranean malevolence that is more than a match for the subject of the painting. The piece might not be as complicated as “Candy Wheel,” or as provocative as “Plushie Veritas,” or as distraught as “Seeds of a Riot.” But it still has a story to tell. It’s soaked in trouble, and it’s still unnerving. Will the 14C artists selected by the jurors be so articulate? We’ll find out in a few weeks.
*Technically, the address for Gallery 14C is 157A 1st Street. But most people who’ve followed the story of the Powerhouse Arts District still think of the building as 150 Bay St. — even though you can’t access the gallery from the Bay Street side. Out of respect for the old-schoolers without whom there'd be no neighborhood, I'll use both addresses. Come to the corner of 1st and Provost and direct yourself to the second floor. The gallery is often open from 1 p.m. to 4 p.m. on weekends. It’ll surely be open during the sixth edition of Art Fair 14C. That’s May 8 through May 11.
