What if somebody held an art exhibition, and there seemed to be no art in it? The idea of an apparently empty gallery has come up a lot lately. Martin Creed's "The Lights Going On and Off" lit up the Mills Gallery in September. In November, the Distillery Gallery mounted "Art Spotting," in which the viewer needed binoculars to view small pieces of art in obscure parts of the exhibition space.
Now comes "Some Sort of Uncertainty" at Axiom Gallery, for which curator Adriana Rios, an architect by training, has turned viewing art into a scavenger hunt. Walk into the exhibit, which is a collaborative effort between Axiom and the currently homeless Art Interactive, and you'll see an empty space. Yet eight artists are exhibiting here. So what's up?
It's a matter of looking closely. Rios says she hopes this will heighten the viewer's awareness of assumptions we make about how to behave in a gallery. She told me this, yet I failed to break an unwritten no-touching rule and flick a switch that turns on Brian Knep's dark video installation "Expand," featuring figures drawn by children swarming upward, and then plummeting.
I did find Liz Nofziger's bittersweet "Nowhere" series, because her tiny figures occupy holes in the wall that beg to be peered into. And I caught on to Nathalie Miebach's minuscule descriptions of climate events drawn on the wall near the floor. But I missed almost everything else. I saw instructions for Bruce Campbell's "A Warm Breath (for Mark Lapore)," a memorial to the late filmmaker - a sign directed me to breathe on the window 10 inches to its left. I did, and saw nothing. When Rios puffed on the glass a fraction of an inch from where I had, the name "Mark" appeared.
"Some Sort of Uncertainty" is intriguing, but only halfway successful. Some of the art is so subtle I don't think it even qualifies as art. Douglas Weathersby, for instance, pulls a variation on Martin Creed: He shines spotlights on a couple of walls. In this context, it's nowhere near as effective as Creed's installation. Weathersby's more worthwhile piece, a drawing made from the dust he swept from the gallery floor, is also more ethereal, but now nearly gone.
Rios chose the work for its nearly invisible aesthetic. Thematically, it's disjointed, running from climate change to land mines to the feeling of being a foreigner. Yet there's a chord of loneliness, loss, and alienation that echoes through the show because everything's so hard to find. That rubs the treasure-hunt scenario the wrong way. Unfortunately, "Some Sort of Uncertainty" is all too apt a description of the exhibit.
Working artists
"Office Space," a group show organized by Elizabeth Duffy and Brian Miller at the New Art Center, attempts to spin the mundane materials of office life into gold. The exhibit at its best focuses on art that deploys materials to beautiful ends, without irony. Every so often a bitter send-up of 9-to-5 existence deflates the show.
Marietta Hoferer's exquisite collages made with shiny translucent tape look like snowflake crystals. Danielle Dimston's fungi made of corrugated cardboard sprout from the wall throughout the exhibit with subtle humor.
Tamiko Kawata's minimalist, bubbly rubber-band-on-canvas works outshine her rubber-band sculptures, which just look like elastic-covered batons. Molly Blieden also makes good use of rubber bands, weaving them into a lacy blanket, but is less effective making coffee cups from paper clips.
Sandra Eula Lee uses paper clips to write the names of former bosses; is it a tribute or a put-down? She also cleverly fashions tiny dress shirts and other garments out of grocery bags and other refuse. G. Jesse
Bright portraits
Beth Urdang Gallery has put together a fun exhibition of works by Alex Katz. It's not new work; Urdang has snatched up pieces for resale and mounted a show. Katz is a master of spare, telling portraits. A 5-foot-tall cutout of his muse, his wife, Ada, greets you at the gallery door. It's a double-sided screenprint on aluminum, her hands and face vivid against the ground of her dark clothing.
The "Alex and Ada Portfolio" features eight serigraphs: five portraits of Ada and three self-portraits. In "Ada in Hat," the lady in a pillbox hat looks like a leaner, meaner Jackie Kennedy. "Sweatshirt" has the artist in bright tones, looking alert; it hangs beside "Passing," a darker self-portrait, in which he wears a suit and fedora and needs a shave.
Also at Beth Urdang, Charlotte Andry Gibbs has several thoughtful still lifes that look traditional until they bring you up short. For instance, a gray bowl in "Winter Fruit" has a stylized flatness - no shadows, no sense of volume. Yet the apples it holds are sensuously modeled, with clefts and swells. The result is pleasantly disarming.
