The Brooklyn Rail

I said that I would write about the work. Within the 78,000-square-foot building of the former Ockawamick School, over eighty artists are represented, so this is a little hard to do. The crowd of fourteen pieces in the gym brings to mind a festivity of some kind. Many of the artists are new to me, but I recognize a piece by Tom Burr.

On the stage is a piece by Andrea Bower. The phrase, “Climate Change is Real,” is scrawled out in loud green neon. Lara Schnitger’s giant expressive figures constructed of simple pine-board armatures covered in nylon are beautiful and strange and in this context make me feel slightly like I’m at a highschool dance. The energy in the room is youthful, such as Lily van der Stokker’s post-minimal boxes clad in cartoon doodles. Yinka Shonibare’s smartly dressed globe-headed figures might be ascending a flight of stairs to receive an award.

But Burr’s work is literally an enclosure and a place to hide out as I get my bearings. Two narrow upright cubbies, each the dimensions of about a king sized bed, face each other. They stand at about an arm's length apart but are connected at each set of corners by long metal brackets that bridge the gap. To me—again another high school dance reference—the hardware recalls arms outstretched like in slow dancing. There is a charged sense of an inside and an outside: outside, nothing to see, just painted white plywood; inside, a rumpled pile of linens, undressed pillows, and a matching set of blue-with-white pinstripes men’s pjs. I connect this work to another fashionably standoffish piece by Paul Mpagi Sepuya which is also formed of discrete pairs. Atop either side of each tall flight of dark wooden bleachers is hung a pair of photos. These diptychs operate more like eyes, cooly observing from a safe remove. In one, Sepuya’s bare arm and camera lens look down on us through the poster-sized window. In the other, more rumpled pillows. This work invokes yet another kind of sophomore narrative about the perennially ritualistic nature of sporting events and their audiences, which can be both intoxicating and dangerous, especially for queer youth.

My attention is drawn to Dianna Molzan’s sporty strange hybrid mural/sculpture for its uncanny strangeness and to Abraham Cruzvillegas’s textile assemblage that extends up and out from the wall, like a kite or a flag being lifted.

Down the long hall to the right of the gym is a series of classrooms each containing on average two artists. In Room 9, the geometry in Rebecca Morris’s painting is cloud-like and fleeting; over the thin grounds are thickly tubed-on lines that work like scaffolding to still the movement. Manfred Pernice’s geometries on the other hand are modular. The honey-comb shaped coffee tables are handsome and unfussy. Made from inexpensive composite boards, a cross forms a base and the tops are mostly the shape of hexagons in white, beige, and soft red melamine. A dozen or more tables, arranged into clusters of two and three, flood the room. Stacked on top of the tables are other objects. Particularly attractive are the many sided cylindrical objects in which skinny, upright slats surround a circular center in the same way a barrel is constructed—they catch the light beautifully. Both round and rectangular volumes are marked with stenciled dates from the early aughts. Arranged on top of these shapes are yet more geometries in the form of little painted tiles and a single accordion book printed onto a single piece of computer paper. There are eight snapshots taken of moments in transit—in the subway and walking around. One caption reads, “18.04.01 / I took this picture because: he stood there so bored and boring; and then this message on his bag / great picture – isn’t it ??” (The photo is of a young caucasian man on the train wearing a blue t-shirt carrying an orange messenger-style bag that reads “express yourself.”) I read this model-like piece as a modern (sculptural) Proustian portrait of a place in time. In many ways this room is the start of the show for me.

I backtrack to meet up with my friend Juliet Jacobson. She is enjoying the Barbara Kasten photo/objects. More geometries. These ones are in brightly colored transparencies made flat by the skilled lens. Gordon Hall is here too and he comes over to say hello. He is delighted with the breadth of material encounters (of the kind that doesn’t require explanation) and happy to see a group of galleries doing a public service in this way. He shows us a photo on his phone from an outdoor installation: a sculpture by XU ZHEN® housed in what looks like an old tennis or basketball court that is now overtaken by vegetation that comes up through the cracks in the pavement. Juliet and I go to see it in person later on. I ask if he saw the single ripe peach hanging on one of Danh Vo’s spindly dying trees. Nope. So, we went to look. Juliet is convinced that it is a fake that has been carefully glued to the tree. I understand that indoor plants can totally seem fake but I give it a squeeze and am tempted to eat it. She says that I should not so I leave it. Joan Snyder’s painting of another spindly tree in the same room opens up into a large wound-like shape, filled with viscous paint, nails, and twigs.

By this point I’m having a lot of fun, the venue allows for all kinds of different associations in the work. The pairings are interesting. Different people keep activating different things for me. It turns out you can play with the metal hooped sculptures scattered through the hallways.

Lloyd Foster’s cutouts fill the whole volume of Room 19. Sometimes the shapes are cut from a photo of a person—a young boy's head, a man in a suit, a yellow school bus—and some are more animal and cartoon-like, a bird-like figure and something that reminds me of Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus (1920). But each shape is then painted and touched and made to feel lively, expressive and worn-in. Like Manfred Pernice’s work, I see this as a model for experiencing a specific time and place. This room calls to mind a kind of schoolyard for artistically talented Black youth.

Jenny Holzer never disappoints. Her sentences are painted in thick block letters onto brown construction paper in dark wooden frames, “DIE FAST AND QUIET WHEN THEY INTERROGATE YOU OR LIVE SO LONG THAT THEY ARE ASHAMED TO HURT YOU ANYMORE” and “TEAR DUCTS SEEM TO BE A GRIEF PROVISION.” In the same room are a couple of paintings by Raymond Saunders which certainly hold their own. They weave together printed material and mural-like hard-edged geometries. The purple and black jive against mustard-colored cinder block walls. I can’t tell for sure, but I think the ginkgo leaves pressed into glass in the last room is a piece by Renée Greene.

I am running out of steam but the good art keeps coming. Down the second hallway Sanya Kantarovsky does his magic directly onto two adjacent chalkboards. Philip Pearlstein’s paintings hang on top of emptied bookshelves in the funky, lounge-y library. They are set off nicely by the black and red checkered linoleum floor tiles. And Annette Kelm’s smart sexy photos in the library annex, hung similarly over empty shelves, recall an after-school extracurricular meeting of radical minds.

It’s 5 p.m. and they are closing. The last thing I’m able to admire is an installation by Michael E. Smith. On the wall in a dark passage that leads to a musty smelling kitchen is a trio of basketballs sutured together that bring to mind a molecule. Inside the kitchen a trumpet stands straight down in the sink like a plunger. And on the counter sits another trio of molecular basketballs.

Looking back, some of my other personal favorites were the back-to-back paintings by Jutta Koether and her triangle of small gridded square paintings. I see her project as a psycho-spiritual one—a language invented for the sake of opening towards and integrating disparate encounters and experiences in the world—not unlike the one I just had at The Campus. And the funny, delicately-touched painting of a floating world/globe by Robert Bordo, which does something similar in the way that it keeps pace with painterly time and place—whatever that is.