There's a lot to love in David Kennedy Cutler's show "Shadow Metier" at Halsey McKay Gallery, but even more to ponder.
Mr. Cutler, who may be familiar from his residency in the East Hampton gallery during the winter weekends of 2018, spends a lot of time thinking about how we project ourselves and our realities across social media and other platforms. These multiple selves are grounded in artifice and subject to manipulation, proof we are living our best lives.
Here, the artist takes a theme from that earlier exhibition, the metaphorical lattice or frame upon which we construct these realities, and makes it physical. These framing devices become a base for wall hangings and sculptures fully in the round.
Another overarching theme operative in his work is the cross-pollination of mediums so that performance, printmaking, painting, sculpture, plaster, and other materials as well as dimensions typically associated with one form of art become fair game for all kinds of hybrids. This makes for a dynamic experience made more so by the tempting colors and visions of spring and the harvest Mr. Cutler employs in many of these works.
Constructed over the past 13 months, the disembodied limbs and repetition of imagery feel like apt metaphors for an existence often cut off from friends, family, and the usual quotidian routine. The references to familiar household products evince a hyper-focused attention to the visual cues of domesticity -- drain opener, Mrs. Meyer's hand soap, Seventh Generation dishwasher detergent -- and signify that one has been in the house a tad too long.
Similarly, there are compositions such as "Apartment Story" in which the wood of the floor, now mounted on a wall, begins to become undone. The peeling back of a board reveals a merging of human to living space as a forearm and hand are exposed and raised, clutching a ribbon of printed wood on canvas.
Many of the other works reference more organic inspirations: roses, tulips, sunflowers, houseplants, lilacs, lilies, ivy. They are joined visually with more hands, pipes, and implied containers reformed from plaster and canvas.
The imagery is often repeated upside down in a not-so-faithful reflection and another reminder that facsimile is not necessarily truth, no matter how artfully it's recreated.
One of the first pieces in the show, "With and Without," features a reflection and replication of the artist's wife's clothing and her arms and hands clutching wheat and poppy seed pods on a sunny yellow background. It reads as a nod to the harvest, a retreat in the outside world in the height of the summer, and to a queen in a deck of playing cards, a pastime to be shared with the household or done in solitude.
Mr. Cutler has said the motifs expressed in these works were collected "from the most basic and immediately tactile substances: my body, my wife's body, our clothing, our food, our glassware, our houseplants, our apartment floor, plants and flowers pilfered from public local parks and traffic medians, plumbing pipe and electrical conduit, tools and construction compounds, and empty disinfectant containers."
"Between Bars" is an endless cycle, much like existence under lockdown. The sculpture, made from inkjet transfer, acrylic, and Permalac (a protective clear coating) on plaster and canvas, is much more than a sum of its parts. Mr. Cutler has made an effigy of what looks like a gift-wrapped florist's offering of sunflowers with images of the flowers transferred onto shards of plaster. While already occupying three dimensions, it references a Cubist's aim to capture multiple viewpoints on a flat canvas. It's an object born from a visual experience that doesn't exist in real life, yet he manifests that abstract two-dimensional expression in material space.
Many of these compositions are very pretty, like a carnivorous plant that attracts prey with nectar or other enticements and then traps it in a world of peril. Tension, built-up inertia, and pain exist in these works. Unlike traditional still-life compositions in which an eventual (or sooner) death is implied, the tulips in "Clean Day (Birthday Flowers)" and the "January Roses" are already spent and wilted. They act much more dead than fresh blooms that die the moment they are cut from their stems, but don't so much look like it. They remind us of our true and fleeting essence, destroyed over time by our own viewfinder and the hashtag goals we set for it.
The show remains on view through Sunday.
