On the Geometric Trail, Part Two: SoHo

Kay WalkingStick: Cataloochee, 2007, gold leaf, oil and wood, diptych; 24 x 48 inches

The geometric trail continues below Houston Street. I get around each month--uptown, Chelsea, downtown, the museums--and the amount of geometry I saw in December was far beyond what I normally see in a given month. And with Warren Isensee's show just opened at Danese, I'll have more geometry to report on later this month.

Here's some of what I saw and liked in SoHo in December: .

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Kay WalkingStick: New Paintings
at the June Kelly Gallery

You might call WalkingStick a quasi abstractionist who is semi geometric. The larger picture is that she’s a landscape painter who introduces abstract elements into her work, typically via a diptych format that allows her to integrate the two disparate elements so that they are no longer disparate at all. The geometry in her new work is derived, I think, from Native American weave patterns (she is a member of the Cherokee Nation).

The installation shots are mine; the individual works are from the gallery's website. You can see more exhibition images at the gallery website and more on Kay's website.

At the June Kelly Gallery, above and below: opposite views of Kay WalkingStick's show

Above: Remember the Bitterroots, 2007, oil on wood panel, diptych, 36 x 72 inches; below: The Road to Santa Fe, 2007, oil on wood panel, diptych, 24 x 48 inches

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Machine Learning
at The Painting Center

Matthew Deleget, a reductivist painter, put together a sharp show of four contemporary artists working in geometric abstraction. And sharp is the operative word here, as the paintings by Henry Brown, Terry Haggerty, Gilbert Hsaio and Douglas Melini are hard edge.

The title, Deleget writes in his catalog essay, comes from the field of artificial intelligence in the way computers are programmed with algorithms to allow them to recognize patterns within the volumes of cyber data they process (like the Google search engine, for instance) so that they continue to make new associations based on what they have done in the past. I didn’t get the connection between the artificial intelligence of the premise and the visual intelligence of the work itself, but I thought it was a smart show.

Two views of Machine Learning at the Painting Center

Above: paintings by Terry Haggerty, Gilbert Hsiao and Henry Brown; below: Brown again, two by Douglas Melini, and another by Haggerty

If you’re in Houston March 8 to May 3, you can catch the exhibition as it travels to Gallery Sonja Roesch. There’s more information on the Painting Center website and on Minus Space, the online curatorial project Deleget maintains with his partner and co-editor, with Rossana Martinez.

Below: Gilbert Hsiao, Encounter, 2006, acrylic on wood panel, 30 inches diameter

Impromptu Geometry
Sometimes the city is a gallery. I saw this geometric assemblage in an old garden lot at the corner of Houston and Elizabeth Streets.