Roger Kamholz
Dec/Jan 2005–06ArtSeen
Three Generations of Abstract Painting: Alice Trumbull Mason, Emily Mason, & Cecily Kahn
This show gathers paintings, drawings, and prints by Alice Trumbull Mason, her daughter Emily Mason, and granddaughter Cecily Kahn, turning scarce space into lively, intimate space. Kahn and her mother are productive today—both had solo shows in New York galleries in 2005—and a good deal of their work here is very recent.
In Pavlovian fashion, mention of globalization promptly weighs on the mind and (when concerning art) tapers the sight. Thanks to its vigilant testifiers who include curator Robert C. Morgan (who is also a frequent contributor to the Rail), artworks that are pinned between its parentheses often affect a common salivation, compelling us to think largely about centers and peripheries, cultures and identities. In The Sign of Paradise Morgan offers the work of Kuma and Made Wianta (one a Japanese artist, the other Balinese) to occasion, like ice cubes chipped off a lumbering glacier, a glimpse at instances of globalization’s personal impact. But far from being brought together to illustrate those heady art issues, they instead shed light on fresh alternatives.
The allure that draws passersby toward a junk shop window likewise draws us to Arthur Simms’s clunky sculptures of discarded objects entangled in networks of knotted hemp rope.
With a repertoire of unlikely materials and self-taught techniques, Michael Ryan paints landscapes saturated in a fog of anxiety, full of bleary and grimacing visions.
Karin Davie’s recent paintings consist of dense layers of profoundly sustained, boldly colored brushstrokes that loop and bend across the canvas.
Like gaunt, filmy stalactites, bunches of cutout prints depicting heavy-duty electrical cable issue from pipes and vents along the heating ducts that cling to the ceiling.
The boldly colorful paintings that make up Emily Mason’s show of recent work reside in a fickle and uncanny space—one with parameters as drastically thin yet overwhelmingly vast as all the myriad tones and nuances existing between like colors.
Look no farther than the streets of our city to observe the extent the art world has been blanketed in money. Garnering a great deal of media attention is the reopening of the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan, following a nine-figure gutting.







