Throughout its history, East Hampton's Halsey McKay Gallery has given its space to quite a few intriguing installations. "Life Raft," an exhibition featuring a sculptural piece of the same title that takes up much of the gallery's first floor, is no exception.
Speaking of history, Patrick Brennan, the man behind "Life Raft" and its accompanying paintings, was the artist whose show opened the gallery in 2011. This is his fourth exhibition there. According to Ryan Wallace, the gallery's director, "each subsequent solo exhibition feels like a marker in the gallery's, as well as the artist's, development."
Mr. Brennan, who recently received a Master of Fine Arts degree from Cornell University, has taken a layered approach to the installation, with painting, collage, sculpture, and sound adding depth to the overall presentation.
The sound comes from J.D. Walsh, known as Shy Layers. It comes across like strings and maybe some wind instruments with percussion and seems as if it were recorded in the bowels of a power-generating plant. It's an attractive element, but the piece has much else to recommend it in its visual components.
The "raft" is a suggested structure, built out of brightly painted wooden crates, empty canvas stretchers, and an old window. At the rear there are tree branches attached to the frames and several lava lamps to provide further color and illumination. A video screen presents abstractions that suggest journeys over water, weather, and the vegetation of land. It's an intriguing meditation on travel, adventure, and survival.
Created this year, there is something very 2020 about this work, which is reminiscent of some people's plans -- serious or in jest -- to leave land and ride out last spring's quarantine on a boat far off shore. This is not the boat of Charon, however, but a rather joyful expression of escape and utopia.
Still, there is an undercurrent of dark themes from artistic history as well, from Hitchcockian psychological drama to French Romanticism and Gericault's doomed rescue vessel, "The Raft of the Medusa."
The wall art has a "more is more" aesthetic. The canvases are layered with other canvases, popsicle sticks, foam, wood, cardboard, and paper. They function as paintings on one level, but take on a sculptural quality. Some seem to have a relationship to "Life Raft"; others, such as "Robert Altman Painting," appear to have their own genesis.
About those popsicle sticks -- they appear in several paintings, forming other raft-like shapes in two compositions and a decorative embellishment in another. A few arrangements have traditional cross-like formations, Greek, Latin, and St. Andrews, that underline the symbol's universality, but also hint ever so slightly at traditional iconography.
There is no consistent palette, but the interplay with art and craft is constant. Colors range from euphoric, as in "Robert Altman Painting," to the murky "Two Fields." "Falling Sun" appears to do so in a bronze and hazy sky. The "sun" looks like a foil takeout container with a cardboard lid. An orangey red square appears above it, throwing off any sense of realism.
"Search Party" is similar. With a title suggesting a narrative subject, there is another disk, this time near the top of the composition, and a brightly colored raft-like applique at the lower left. Rather than a sun, the disk in this case takes on the glimmer of a searchlight. The variegated charcoal ground can be either sky or sea at night. The flat formalism, which allows no perspective or vanishing point, is disorienting even as its applied elements push past the picture plane.
There's a lot of art history talking to itself, century to century, in this room, and it brings us to the present moment in a very contemporary way. It is a great environment in which to move on to Scott Olson's paintings upstairs.
Mr. Olson, who is a friend and colleague of Mr. Brennan's, presents another type of assimilation and re-presentation of previous artistic intentions. In this case, he focuses exclusively on the distinct styles and artistic modes of modernism.
He applies oil on linen with an apparently light hand. Is the color soaking into the support or being applied and removed to leave its matte traces? There is nothing too showy in this work, just subtle sublimity as jewel-like colors are left to attract light and then tuck it away.
Although there are few lines in this work, the borders between each color shard are mostly firm and predetermined. This isn't an emotional abstraction, but something harder-edged, based in early American reactions to European abstraction, specifically Cubism, rather than a reassessment of the postwar American Abstract Expressionists.
There is a stained-glass quality in the assemblage of colors. Their shapes are not so angular that they supersede organic forms. And just when it seems as though the artist's motives are clear, he throws in a work of loose overlapping circular forms and colors, letting the translucent application reveal the layers beneath.
Charles Demuth, Max Weber, Marsden Hartley, and Charles Sheeler all seem to be in this artwork's DNA. Yet Mr. Olson's own approach introduces a more contemporary sensibility, with fresh and unique compositions that keep us guessing about where he might go next.
Both exhibitions are on view through Nov. 23.
