The Brooklyn Rail

While Catskill Art Space’s group show James Esber, Jane Fine, J. Fiber, Tracey Goodman, Jim Lee has no thematic throughline, the works in each gallery emphasize a distinct creative faculty. In CAS’s east gallery, it’s taste. Esber and Fine, connoisseurs of high and low art, show works by their own hand as well as two pieces executed by “J. Fiber,” the portmanteau name they give to their collaborative efforts. A longtime married couple, Fine and Esber share so many touchpoints in their visual arsenals that their J. Fiber pieces make it hard to tell where one artist leaves off and the other begins. In CAS’s west gallery, it’s imagination. Goodman fills up the entire space with an installation, “Choose any hour on the clock.”, Tinkers - Paul Harding (2023–24). The title refers to the Paul Harding novel Tinkers, which takes up the idea of clock repair as a metaphor for life’s frail beauty. Inspired by Livingston Manor’s history of flooding, Goodman’s installation lays set pieces whose possible meanings she subverts with dreamlike displacements. For Lee’s works in CAS’s wide central hallway on the first floor, it’s observation. His pieces, which fall between painting and sculpture, force the viewer to confront how they are made and the qualities of the materials used in the process.

Esber and Fine leaven their shared love of painting—the act itself and its long historical trajectory—with healthy doses of humor. Esber’s Selfie II (2023), is a trippy portrait, a mix of Zap Comix graphics crafted with the exquisite attention to detail of a Northern Renaissance painting. Fine’s See Jane Go (2023), is an abstract landscape executed with New York School painterliness. It combines graffiti-style lettering with a zingy palette of near-fluorescent colors we might see in kidvid. As Esber has moved from figuration toward abstraction and Fine in the opposite direction from abstraction toward figuration, their J. Fiber collaborations play in the space between these opposing tendencies. Who Axed Who (2024), a J. Fiber exquisite corpse, is made of eleven sheets of different colored paper arranged in a daisy chain. Who Axed Who comes off like a good tennis match where the two players sharpen each other’s game in a series of extended improvisations that combine pop figuration, letters, and abstract passages. On one sheet, the collisions of Esber’s balloon shapes and Fine’s boxes repeating the word “love” fill the page with nervous energy.

Leaving behind the bright colors and zany imagery of Esber, Fiber, and Fine, Goodman’s installation, “Choose any hour on the clock.”, Tinkers - Paul Harding, strikes an elegiac tone. The passage of time dominates the exhibition space with an entire wall of clocks of different sizes dotting the back wall. A palette of shades of blue and white accentuates the somber mood. A big indigo circle painted on the westernmost wall includes heads of fish emerging from it and the bodies of fish flopping on dried plaster pours on the floor, which seem to seep into the space from the wall. This suggestion of flow continues in the cascade of baby blue chiffon fabric running down the south-facing window and puddling beneath. In the center of the gallery two big fabric circles suspend from the ceiling, spotlit by a yellow lamp, while a chrome statuette of a Madonna with a brilliant, reflective surface is the installation’s focal point. The different parts of the installation feel like characters in a hallucinatory play whose storylines abound with contradiction and disjunction.

Where Goodman’s installation suggests a dreamscape, Lee’s objects belong in the here and now. A series of five small wall constructions play with the conventions of painting while remaining resolutely sculptural. Hanging from a metal rod, Untitled (CO/HO No. 2) (2024) is a hunk of plaster, wood, and staples spotted with blotches of oil and acrylic paint. Untitled (Vol. 1 No. 1) (2024) looks like a red-and-black painting Lee removed from its stretcher bars and stapled to the wall. Its blunt presentation and facture deny any of the perceptual habits—gestalt, figure/ground, line, shape, and so on—that painting depends on. In the center of Untitled (Vol. 1 No. 1) is a clear plastic rectangle on top of a paper sheet with writing obscured by black paint brushed onto the plastic. Is our inability to read the writing an echo of our inability to “read” illusory space in this artwork? If so, it would be an excellent visual pun. Lee’s work insists that we see what’s in front of us, in sharp counterpoint to Goodman’s oneiric narrative or Esber/Fiber/Fine’s playful mashups of cultural references.