Opinion
On Shelter Island, Three Shows Go Figure
By Jennifer Landes
(Aug. 20, 2009) If you haven’t made your way over to Shelter Island, now might be a good time to get on that ferry and go look at some art. Three strong figurative art shows, two by women and one featuring women, have taken up space at three galleries that are a stone’s throw away from each other on Route 114.
 Mosquito Hawk Gallery
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At Boltax, Charlotta Janssen has taken up the theme of outrageous outfits. Mary Larsen addresses elements of the grotesque that lie beneath the surface of beauty at Mosquito Hawk, and John Grande repaints the photographic subjects of Cindy Sherman at Sara Nightingale.
Each of these shows has a strong point of view and a subversive edge that is often in your face. Apparently designed to shake up the languid complacency that often defines August, the exhibits force the viewer to contemplate and reconcile the uncomfortable truths each artist presents in varying degrees.
Perhaps the most coolly conceptual, the subjects in Mr. Grande’s exhibit may look disarmingly familiar and are, of course, if you have been paying attention at all to late-20th-century photography. The subjects are primarily from Ms. Sherman’s original “Untitled Film Stills” series, a full portfolio of 69 black-and-white photographs that famously sold some 15 years ago to the Museum of Modern Art, anointing them for the ages as part of the canon and preserving them as a complete unit.
Mr. Grande has taken them and some later works as the subjects of his oil paintings. Absent is the nudge of irony one might expect from such a treatment. His faithfully replicated paintings, which include the original photograph’s own abstractions, are more homage than anything snarky or disrespectful.
Ms. Sherman did not take specific movie scenes as subject matter, choosing instead to portray feminine archetypes as depicted in film and the media. As much as they are ironic, they evade comparisons to camp or satire.
Mr. Grande’s change of medium from film to paint and the size from intimate to colossal raises age-old issues about the hierarchy of mediums. As the gender of the artist changes, a subtle shift occurs. His depiction of these guises and of Ms. Sherman’s characters puts her firmly back into the role of object, rather than merely subject of the work.
Still, the images benefit from such a treatment. There are only five in the show, but they are all mysteriously arresting in their shift from self to other and graphically appealing. Two are in color, an image of the artist as a garishly made-up and costumed cabaret singer, and a slightly tortured and shame-faced schoolgirl.
The painting is flat and has an almost air-brushed quality. Rare is the evidence of a brushstroke. In comparison to the original photographs, the works take on a Photorealist feel, even with the slight abstraction. The strong angular lighting and its consequential shadows are faithfully reproduced as well.
Only in a few instances is it apparent that the artist is having some fun with the work. It occurs most obviously in “Untitled Portrait 13,” in which the spines of the books Ms. Sherman is standing before have titles of monographs of her contemporaries, such as Richard Prince and Jean-Michel Basquiat, well before they would have been regarded as significant enough for such treatments.
 Boltax Gallery
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As to the standard questions of appropriation, it is difficult to get too worked up about Mr. Grande’s particular employment of the strategy. Perhaps if he had simply rephotographed the works or left them in their original size, it might be easier to find fault with them. Here, however, as familiar as they are, they seem like entirely separate and different works. Or maybe in the age of the Internet’s instant replication and blurring of copyright law, we’re all just a little more jaded now.
At Boltax, Ms. Janssen’s “Inappropriately Dressed” subjects also play dress up and she has placed real Fort Greene neighbors and other acquaintances in unusual costumes or otherwise inappropriate attire for the place or person.
Ms. Janssen photographs her subjects first, choosing dramatic angular or spot lighting, and then paints them in a more abstracted fashion. A combination of acrylic, oil, and iron oxide give the paintings a sickly or otherworldly feeling. And yet, despite the odds against them, they hold a quirky nostalgia and seemingly unintentional beauty.
 Sara Nightingale Gallery |
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In these canvases, girls are dressed for the prom while getting their hair done in a neighborhood salon. The portrait has all of the formality of a regular prom picture, but the subjects are as relaxed as their footwear and the whole thing has less of a staged quality even while the set-up is much more artificial.
Particularly striking are the images of men in these works. “Madonna with Child (Rod and Ezra)” layers all kinds of associations of gender and art history, conflating them in an ultimately sweet and tender depiction of a parent and child. The dress the man is wearing may feminize him on one level, but his cool assessment of the outside world and his protective arm draped across the baby’s front feel much more fatherly than motherly.
“Inappropriate Gardeners (Chris and Shawn)” displays a woman in an evening dress and her companion in a bathing suit holding a bass cello. Something about their attitude and appearance is reminiscent of Sonny and Cher.
It is often the props that the subject holds that make their attire seem more inappropriate. A chef’s knife, strainer, and rubber gloves are the most unnerving elements in “Kitchen Ninja (Soo Jeong).” Likewise it is the note that reads “I’m looking for anybody,” the gloves, and the applied butterflies on the ballet skirt that give “Inappropriate Jogger (Michael)” its particular edge.
“Attack of the Rubber Duckies: Wearing Vinyl (Jules in an Inappropriate Nightmare)” looks not unlike one of Ms. Sherman’s later works, in which she still employed herself as the subject but became more removed through elaborate costumes and settings.
Over all the show has a quirky dislocation from its subjects’ external appearance that is softened and ennobled by the demeanor and interior life of the people depicted.
The same cannot be said for Mary Larsen’s brutal and merciless renditions of deep-seeded or possibly just below the surface nightmares and dark imaginings of the soul in “Revealed” at Mosquito Hawk Gallery. Women and men depicted as monstrous, mechanical, disemboweled, and with limbs apparently cut off butcher-style populate most of the works on paper.
They have a nodding debt to Egon Schiele and fellow Austrian Sigmund Freud as well as more recent explorations of sinister (and drug-induced) elements of the soul by Ralph Steadman with a hint of “Beavis and Butthead.”
What is best about the drawings is that they are extremely well executed: richly colored, very detailed, expertly drafted, and gorgeous in their grotesquerie. They are also very funny in a sick, dark way, which the titles underline.
“Cock-a-Diddle Don’t” features a man, shirtless with belted jeans, with a rooster head balancing a candle on a bloodied hand. Opposite him is a woman dressed in a bra and stockings, her left arm cut off mid-bicep, her naked and red ass balanced precariously on a pile of books and some strange dog-like creatures. Her bloodied hand holds a brush and she appears to be actively painting the watercolor-washed background of the composition. The male seems to implore her to join him for the night while she looks down at him, arm raised in defiance.
Most compositions are like this, complicated and layered and full of creepy yet fascinating imagery. Other titles include “She Found Them in the Pool Filter,” “I Enjoy Long Walks on the Beach, Sushi, and Building Model Trains,” and “Nights at the Tantra Lounge,” all with the requisite uncomfortable renderings that make this show memorable and hard to dismiss.
“My Cindy, Your Cindy” is up at Sara Nightingale through Sept. 3. “Inappropriately Dressed” is at Boltax until Aug. 31. “Revealed” is at Mosquito Hawk until Sept. 1.