The Brooklyn Rail

Kevin McNamee-Tweed has found a way of layering pictures into fields of stray epiphanies, acute visual jokes, doubtings of art and self, and ego-releases—and all this on ceramic slabs that bear an obsession with line and color and that rest in the hands like a book. A bonus pleasure is that there are no good names for these objects he makes. Are they ceramic paintings? Wall-hanging ceramics? Literature? This last effort at a verbal handle was a title for one of their shows, and it accents this work’s nearness to poetry, its clipped storytelling, and its mischievous lyricism. McNamee-Tweed’s pieces show how you don’t need to make bright or deep remarks when you have a witty eye and a delicate hand. A sharp naivete, the unrest of the soul, and a great devotion to technique all play off one another in this disarming, very heady exhibition that elevates a transcendental curiosity and disgraces the pretense of self-knowledge and other complacencies of the spirit.

Many pieces evoke a story without a plot—like a paragraph lifted from a strange fable—and many capture movements of the head and the heart like a good poem goes down the page. One of the most funny and oddly poignant works in the show finds a tiny, lone figure playing the saxophone to boulders and trees, near what seems to be the cave where he dwells. Its title is The Hermit (all works 2025), but the rocks, foliage, and sky belittle this solitary artist, who is presented with both parody and respect. Each shape around him glows with iridescent glazes, translucent colors, and speckled textures that McNamee-Tweed clearly loves to explore and share, so that the material language of technique seems to humble the artistic expression of the scene. The name for this show, Before Lunch, which riffs off the poems of Edwin Denby and Frank O’Hara, evokes something close to this hermit’s pondering and meditations, but this work also antagonizes any self-romanticism we might bring to it. In many of McNamee-Tweed’s works, an image seems to see itself there and begin a trip of re-framings and afterthoughts that is driven by an awareness and a humor that makes this work easy to enjoy, but ornery and biting, too.

McNamee-Tweed has a knack for abstracting and concretizing the entities he draws as if a flower, a realization, or a comic-strip old man might actually be a sympathetic friend, a frog, or our feelings about death. At times he risks everything on a potentially corny or too-sweet image, which is then questioned by a keen, even erudite intellect—a synthesis that usually lands a piece right where we can connect with it. I asked him how he knows when a piece is ready, and he said, “I smile or I laugh.” The result feels neither fully realized nor lost; neither sardonic nor comfortable in its unmistakable tenderness. These pieces always know they are there, and usually with another thought waiting for when we are ready for it.

There’s no shortage of irony in this show, but only enough to make the beauty stand out against the naivete, and this makes the work eventful and alive. That last line I actually stole from Ted Berrigan’s review of a Joe Brainard show, and I think he was plagiarizing something John Ashbery had said about another artist. But it is appropriate now partly because McNamee-Tweed relishes in a barefaced plagiarism that reminds viewers of a truth that many artists might wish to bury—that any true voice is thick with love and theft. But the line is also illuminating here because he is always forging unlikely co-minglings of vulnerability and mockery. The edge to this work is hard to place because of the extraordinary pleasantness of the surfaces, but it has to do with his insistent ways of making fun of art, spiritual pursuits, himself, and anyone in a gallery or a museum or who holds a book. There’s a funny awareness to all his spiritual references, like the Triskelion, Sisyphus, and the glorious, Buddha-esque title of one piece, Frog of Perpetual Becoming, but if they are spiked with humor it’s only because they actually do matter to us and must be saved from the disappointing sincerity of contemporary spirituality. The mood is too wry to be called meditative, but perhaps the prickliness of these pieces has to do with how a wry mind comes to terms with its religious instincts. McNamee-Tweed manages to let irony make beliefs and practices more viable rather than cheapening them. This opens a surprising place where irony and vulnerability are not the opposing sides of some spectrum, but are each only at their truest when tied at the hip, so that the intensification of one somehow demands and also makes way for the strengthening of the other.

More vulnerable than the spirituality here is the transparent love for line and color and for the creation by hand of beautiful little objects. Never schooled in ceramics and self-taught through wild experiments, McNamee-Tweed talks about the “mad chemistry” of mixing “infinite combinations” of clays, glazes, and pigments that can render exquisite beauty or send the work up in smoke in the kiln. One can imagine the defeats he must have endured to come upon these colors and textures that so aptly express an intimate, pensive warmth that is also somehow distant and aloof. He’s honed his technique at these “imageobjects,” as he calls them, for eight years now. Even knowing nothing about ceramics, one can’t fail to notice the precision and control that he’s gained, though he says he still has no idea how he will realize any particular piece before he starts mixing glazes for it. “Working with wet clay,” he says, “drawing in, interacting with this lovely material, and the protracted, mysterious process of glazing and firing has been enough to keep me humbly devoted.” This show at Mrs. consists of fifteen ceramic slabs that will hang from September 4–October 4, and a second set from October 7–November 1, all variously pictorial, and none bigger than about 9 x 10 inches. Of McNamee-Tweed’s last New York show, the poet-critic John Yau commented that “artists working on this small scale have not been seen as ambitious—a prejudice that still persists in some quarters,” and a prejudice that Yau praises this artist for confuting. To any suggestion that he try larger works or use a different medium, McNamee-Tweed likes to quote Anne Truitt saying that her (also unnamable) pieces “disperse my intensities in a way that suits me.”

Smallness, lightness, and play are vital to how McNamee-Tweed connects with viewers, but equally important is his disciplined craftsmanship and his love for mischief that jabs at the high-and-heavy seriousness of “the arts.” These tensions grow most vivid in the jewels of this show: the “Accumulation” pieces, which show his various works hanging among other images and placed alongside more traditional ceramics on desks and shelves in a home. And within this tableau we might see the swirl of woodgrain become the Triskelion’s spirals, or shape as field-of-color, color as surface texture, texture as a face, face as frog, frog as movements of the spirit drawn in clay, and clay as simple houseware. These works create a mise en abyme on the meaning of art to the artist, and yet they foster an earthly release from any such elevated pursuits. Delicately wrought artworks clutter the walls beside equally beautiful jugs and vases—a rebuke to any celebration of masterpieces and perhaps a sabotage of pretentiousness itself. If this work ever comes off as glib or seems to back away from the aesthetic and spiritual questions it raises, we should trust that its rich conflicts will continue fomenting within the “Frog of Perpetual Becoming” who lives inside this restlessly talented, hard-working artist. Goofy, profound, tender, or barbed as his pieces may be, what counts the most is the great human pleasure offered by these confounding objects that invite you to come intimately close, look and ponder, but not to try to name them.