Roger Kamholz

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.
Alice Trumbull Mason, “No.1 Towards a Paradox” (1969). Oil on canvas. Courtesy of Joan T. Washburn Gallery.
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.
Installation shot from The Sign of Paradise. Courtesy of Mike Weiss Gallery.
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.
Arthur Simms, installation view. Courtesy of Five Myles.
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.
Michael Ryan, “Destroyers” (2005), mixed media on panel.
Karin Davie’s recent paintings consist of dense layers of profoundly sustained, boldly colored brushstrokes that loop and bend across the canvas.
Karin Davie, “Between My Eye and Heart No. 16” (2005), oil on canvas. Courtesy of  Mary Boone Gallery, New York.
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.
Nicola L³pez, “Vertigo” (2005), mixed media. Courtesy of Caren Golden Fine Art.
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.
Emily Mason, “Embraced” (2004), oil on canvas. Courtesy of David Findlay Jr Fine Art.
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.
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