The current exhibit at Deborah Ronnen Fine Art, “Thought
Patterns,” presents the work of nine contemporary artists — Hernan Bas, Erica
Baum, Sanford Biggers, McArthur Binion, Cecily Brown, Sam Gilliam, Emil Lukas,
Julia Rommel, and Kiki Smith — each with dramatically different techniques,
styles, and subject matter.
“The idea was to have artists who work in pattern, but also
to think about thought,” Ronnen says. Here, “pattern” means both repetitive
visual sequences as well as the thought processes that “manifest themselves through
imagery, process, concept, and title,” she says.
New York City-based artist Erica Baum’s work formed the
genesis for the show concept, and constitutes nine prints in the exhibit. The
selection of Baum’s work comes from a few different series, which are united by
her knack for deriving new possibility from the seemingly mundane and finite.
For example, her “Dog Ear” series of archival pigment prints
were created by scanning and enlarging the corners of book pages that she had
folded down, which yielded “fortuitous, ordinarily overlooked juxtapositions of
words,” Baum said in a 2013 interview in “Art in America.”
From Baum’s “Dog Ear” series, Ronnen is showing the 2010
print, “Not to Wear Stockings,” the title of which comes from phrase that
appeared when a page corner was turned down. The full phrase: ‘Your sister is
not to wear stockings,” straddles the two pages, part of a block of text set at
right angles to one another. Baum says the series has “an extremely high
failure rate; not just any fold will do.”
These fascinating little secret narratives exist in a state
of hidden potential until the right person realizes it.
Baum’s other work follows this “found” realities mode of
seeing and documenting happenstance. Her “Naked Eye” series is represented in
this exhibit with five prints, including “Pamela.” Here, Baum has fanned the
pages of cheap, photo-illustrated paperbacks from the 1950’s-1970’s, and
photographed the interiors. What results is a series of slivers of text and
imagery, bisected vertically by the colored edges of the pages.
There’s an ephemeral and nature to the work — “each spreading
of the pages would produce an entirely different picture,” Baum says in the Art
in America interview. It’s also unrepeatable. In “Pamela,” neon red edges divide
time-yellowed pages, images of tree branches, and a photograph of a woman
gazing off-shot.
Because of the angle that the pages are held, the images
appear distorted. Before I learned of Baum’s process, the distortion of the
figures and the disruption of the vertical lines reminded me of a glitchy
analog video or something of that sort.
“There’s a great deal of humor here, it’s very poetic, and at
the same time it’s minimal,” Ronnen says. There’s a story available through
this abstraction, and every viewer will construct the meaning differently. “There
are artists who want to dictate what you see, but that’s not this work,” she
says.
Chicago-based artist McArthur Binion’s work is built upon
autobiographical experiences.
“All of the work has two layers,” Ronnen says. Text and
script are repeated in neatly arranged blocks, derived from his address books,
which he’s kept for 50 years, as well as images of his birth certificate, which
identifies him as “colored.” Binion has divided the lines of language with
colorful markings made with paint sticks, and the overall effect alludes to
agricultural rows as seen from above.
This mark-making comes from a whole childhood of working in
the fields, Ronnen says. “And then he breaks through that, into the New York
art world.” The address book fragments name-drop famous friends: Sol LeWitt,
Bill Jensen, Al Loving, and others.
The work of New York City-based, multi-media artist Sanford
Biggers is represented in three engaging pieces that combine paper collage,
silkscreen, and hand-coloring. His subject matter and imagery are both ethereal
and heavy, with titles that often allude to both Buddhist and socio-political
concepts.
For example, in “The Floating World: Lotus,” a central
flower’s petals are formed from the shapes of slave ships, adding a heavy layer
to the concept of floating, and referencing that these ships, floating on the
sea, were for a time the entire world to their occupants. And like a lotus
rising from the mud, the flower of this fleet of ships has its roots embedded
in the murky territory of unanswered atrocity.
Ronnen has versions of Hernan Bas’s aquatint print, “Revised
Endpapers for the Homosexual Neurosis” in both pink and blue. The work is
reminiscent of pastoral toile, with a repetition of varying vignettes of
just-pubescent, wingèd boys
exploring and resting in natural settings.
These boys are on the threshold of sexual awakening, meditative
while waiting for their wings to dry. The emotional inner world of boys is as
uncommon a subject matter in contemporary art as it is in contemporary politics
— their sensitivity and vulnerability are not as protected or encouraged as
that of girls, to our mutual detriment.
In Bas’s “The Difference Was Clear,” a youth sits amid
plants, staring rather forlornly up at the sky. Bas’s smart exaggeration of his
arm length, descending from slouching shoulders, paints an acutely awkward
picture of a brooding adolescent who hasn’t fully grown into his body.
Kiki Smith’s 2015 intaglio print, “Esperanza,” is a fitting
name that also means “hope.” The work is comprised of a grayscale and
prismatically-pastel version of the nearly the same image of rainfall. Layered
and atmospheric, both scenes have a depth that is disrupted here and there by
iridescent raindrops of hologram paper and mirrored Mylar.
Smith’s dreamy print has an almost ineffable, living quality
to it, and insinuates two ways of looking at the exact same thing. While the
upper, gray portion has a calming, Zen quality, it also contains the gloomy
associations with an overcast sky. But rain is life, says the lower half.
Erica Baum will be in town on Thursday, May 26, to
give a talk at 6 p.m. at George Eastman Museum (900 East Avenue). Admission to
the talk is $6, $3 students with ID, and free to museum members. For more
information, call 271-3361 or visit eastman.org.
Art | Art Review | Deborah Ronnen Fine Art | prints | Hernan
Bas | Sanford Biggers | McArthur Binion | Erica Baum | Kiki Smith
This article appears in May 25-31, 2016.
