The Brooklyn Rail

Room Raiders was a reality TV dating show on MTV from the early 2000s. In a typical episode, a combination of three men and women would be brought into a van while a member of the opposite sex snooped in their rooms. The show was meant to be funny, asking the question, “Who owns these things?” The people whose belongings were looked through were not there to defend or explain; their objects had to stand on their own.

Something not altogether different is happening at My Pet Ram in the two person show Into the Fold. Aparna Sarkar and Davis Arney present us with two very different worlds, explored with nobody around to explain themselves. A call and response develops as you walk through the gallery. If Sarkar’s effusiveness heats up too much, Arney’s reserve is there to cool things down.

Sarkar’s work walks a tightrope between intellectual experiment and corny still life. Deftly avoiding these pitfalls, she finds the perfect balance between two traditions, namely, “pure” geometric abstraction and perceptual painting. Her work, rich with thick layers of paint, captures interiors and fabrics in a way that feels alive, deeply felt and thoroughly worked through.

In Kurta with Zari Thread (2024), a blue garment dominates the composition. Folds interact with yellow grids that sit on top of subtly shifting blues. The color feels juiced, pumped up to match Sarkar’s excitement in looking and describing. The meticulous description of a paisley pattern contrasts with the grid and heightens the work. It reminds me of Mondrian and early Frank Stella.

Similarly, Still Life with Marigolds (2024) draws viewers in with bright oranges, yellows, and masterful paint handling. A line of flowers lay like fallen dominos across the lower portion of a table. The paint is so thick I want to run my finger through it. Laying in the top quadrant of the table is a nesting doll, an elephant figurine, and a blue glass bottle with a cork. All of this is placed on a patterned cloth, enveloping them in a tactile warmth.

The items in Sarkar’s work are well loved, clearly holding histories of their own. We’re on the outside of these stories, but the warm feelings of love and nostalgia are palpable, evident in the careful description of objects. The work acknowledges the unstopping passage of time, while underscoring the ability of small, often overlooked items to transcend the limits of specific seasons of life. Ultimately, Sarkar captures the dynamic interplay between past and present, allowing memory attached to objects to flow with change and shift depending on the owner.

If Sarkar’s work is about an ever fluctuating past, Arney’s is about a stagnant, unending present. Nothing happens or has ever happened—and that’s a good thing.

Casual drug use looms large over the work. There are references to marijuana, mushrooms, and liquor — anything to take the edge off what is clearly a weird, stressful existence. The world that Arney depicts is a medicated one.

Remedy, Poison, or Scapegoat (2024) is to me, especially disturbing. As in all the work, Alex Coville’s presence is felt in the deeply unsettling strangeness, but not overpoweringly so. The upper right quadrant of the painting is taken up by depictions of rocks, minerals, and crystals. They receive their glow from what appears to be a sun lamp on the desk in the opposite lower corner. On the table sits a glass of red wine and a water pipe. Neither one has evidence of being used, save the slightly burnt bowl of the pipe. There are no lip marks on the glass, even the water in the pipe is clean. The crystals evoke geological time scales, making me wonder how much longer these objects will sit untouched.

Paperweight (2024) takes the discomfort and heightens it. The formula here is flipped; on the left quadrant is a poster of Jazz pianist and composer Keith Jarrett. There’s a chair with a sweater draped over it, and a perfectly crumpled piece of paper on the table’s surface. It looks as though every fold was deliberately and carefully done, evoking origami more than mindless disposal. The quiet horror is amplified by the mirror in the top right corner of the painting. Looking at this work reminds me of Hitchock’s Rear Window, as if I am Jeff Jeffries peeking back into the living space that feels like it belongs to a suburban Patrick Bateman.

Together, Arney and Sarkar exhibition feels like a perfectly timed acknowledgement of the strange timelessness of today. It’s not uncommon to feel as though the world we’re living in now is one in which versions of past events are constantly happening on top of each other. Online it’s popular to say that nothing ever happens. That there is no big event that can change things fundamentally in the way you’d expect. Arney and Sarkar acknowledge both of these feelings in a way that feels honest and refreshing. Let Into The Fold serve as an example for all of us to follow in working through these strange next few years.