Rendering the darkness
Artist draws on Columbine
Aaron Williams didn't plan it this way, but his exhibition at OH+T Gallery could not have been better timed. His subject is school shootings. In the wake of the Virginia Tech massacre, his installation of paintings and sculptures is particularly poignant and stark.
The show is not entirely successful; Williams is just beginning to get his arms around difficult and touchy material. He focuses on the environment and words of Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris , the shooters at Columbine. He attempts to capture and comprehend their alienation.
The steely, vivid landscape paintings would be strong even without their dark source material. Williams aims to depict the world around Littleton, Colo. , as Klebold and Harris saw their hometown. He sets passages of dreamy watercolors against areas of flat, neon-tone spray paint or glossy black enamel. "Forest Fire" has spiny black trees carved out of a hazy red sky.
The jarring contrasts make for fascinating scenes, as in "Are We Dead ? ," in which the black enamel trees in the foreground jolt out of a watery blue forest, all beneath a harsh orange sky. A series of images of poisonous plants indigenous to Littleton alternately seduces and slaps you in the face with its jagged dance among mediums.
The sculptures flesh out the installation handsomely, but they don't hold up on their own. Williams has taken fragments of text from Harris and Klebold's journals and scrawled them backward on scrawny old logs, painted and set upright on beds of leaves and broken mirrors around the gallery. You have to lean in and read the text in the mirrors. It's all too sly and encoded, like a secret-message game for 8-year-olds, and the metaphor of the broken mirror is anything but subtle.
Williams is a young artist. He has courageously taken on a topic most people don't want to approach. To consider these young killers with patience and compassion, rather than hatred and blame, is a step toward preventing this kind of violence in the future. He's also clearly talented; time probably will refine his raw edges.
But this is about more than coveting other people's stuff: It's about painting itself. Warshauer depicts these homes, pools, furniture, and pricey paintings in flat, crisp tones. She collapses the boxy shapes, planes, and hard angles of modernist architecture onto her canvas, rendering symbols of power with carefully applied latex and acrylic paint. There's something equalizing about that act: She makes it her own, and available to us to take home, if for a price. She does not lose sight of her own place in the art market's food chain.
The model-size paintings in some of the houses pop off the walls. "Bachelor's Bounty" features works by Stuart Davis, Sol LeWitt, and Clyfford Still . An Andy Warhol hangs at the top of a staircase glimpsed through the floor-to-ceiling windows of a three-story apartment in "Urban Sleek" ; we're viewing life refracted through the modernist grid. Warshauer's works are so planar, the canvases, walls, tabletops, and pools are all cards she shuffles, each time laying out a different spread of plummy consumption.
Webster's an abstract painter in the tradition of Arthur Dove -- color, form, and spontaneity predominate. In a series of paintings on antique paper, the spinning, pulsing biomorphic forms he specializes in make a sweet contrast with their sometimes tattered and stained backgrounds. The shapes -- a pink xylophone fading into the distance, a whirling mandala with golf-club spokes -- come across as homely, yet catalyzing.
The works on canvas feel more finished, yet they, too, are full of surprises. For all their sheen, there's often a soft edge of discomfort and imperfection. "Big Grab" looks like a wavering pinwheel of yellow and white with red-tipped nodes against a blue ground. Look again, and it ' s clear that blue "ground" was painted over concentric circles to create the pinwheel: Webster flips figure and ground on their heads.
The showpiece of the exhibit is "Messenger," in which three candy-cane bands swell and narrow, pendulously undulating toward one another, held by voluptuous brackets of reds, against a Pepto-Bismol ground. Blue tips two of those bands, and it didn't occur to me until I'd left the gallery that there was a red-white-and-blue reference in that peppermint stick of a canvas. "Messenger" hovers between Op Art, with its winking stripes and bright tones, and something disturbingly fleshy and messily alive; it's a lovely tension. 