More on "Pull"

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I've been back from Atlanta for a couple of weeks, and in fact I now have a ton of New York shows to report on, but I want to take one last long look at what's up at the Marcia Wood Gallery: Timothy McDowell's solo, Kingdom Come (through October 2), and the Pull portfolio, the print project in which I participated (through November 18).

The Little Peek I posted recently from the gallery was preceded a couple of months earlier by my report from Printmaking Camp, the week we spent at Connecticut College producing the portfolio. So here let me just walk you through the galleries.

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We're in the front gallery with Timothy McDowell's solo show, Kingdom Come, looking into the Pull exhibition, specifically McDowell's print. While Marcia Wood was the organizer and publisher of the print project, McDowell was the mentor and master whose experience allowed six of us to produce an edition of 30 in five days

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Standing in the doorway between galleries: As you look to the left you see Kim Anno's print, Heavens, and Katherine Taylor's Parallax. (The links will bring you to the individual images, each with a statement by the artist. And click here for the gallery's installation shots, which are more wideangled--and frankly, better, than mine. )

Moving around the gallery: McDowell's Arcadian Troubles and Don Pollack's Mysterious Island. All are on Rives BFK, 19 x 26"

Continuing from Pollack's print we come to my Soie . . .

. . . and Kate Javens's Father Ram, below right

Javen's print is followed by the colophon, which you can't really see in the picture above . . .

. . . which brings us back to the doorway and a view into the front gallery which holds McDowell's show

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Timothy McDowell: In the foreground, nine oil-on-linen Nature Studies, 2010. To the left of the door, Spawn/Spill, 2010, oil on panel

Before we walk out and head over to the MWG annex next door, I want to talk a bit about McDowell's work. Fluent in both encaustic and oil for his paintings, as well as watercolor for his works on paper and, of course, ink for his prints, McDowell is inspired by the flora and fauna, genus and species of nature. It's clear he has a deep connection to the environment, from the tiniest cell to the wide-angle landscape--and, indeed, those shifts in scale are often present in each individual painting, so that silhouetted hares hop or birds fly in a magical soup of amoebas, coral, seed pods, everything vertiginously out of scale in a glorious palette that tends toward celadon, ochre, rose and grisaille. The message, I think, is that we are all in the soup together.

In the MWG annex, Wood has created a salon installation of the work of the six Pull artists. It's a good opportunity for a viewer to see how each artist's painting relates to the print each made.

The work on the left wall is mine. The diamond is a direct result of my print. The framed gouache painting on the left wall (shown unframed below) is from a series of 22 I did this summer, each 22 x 30 inches. The series is called Soie, like the print. Following that gouache series, I began a new series of paintings in encaustic on panel: Diamond Life, two of which you see at left. Consider it a taste of things to come. Diamond Life is the series I will show in my solo at the gallery in April

Joanne Mattera, Soie 21, 2010, gouache on Arches 140 lb hot press, 22 x 30 inches (before frame)

On the left half of the wall are oil paintings by Kate Javens. A master draughtswoman, Javens creates paintings of animals that represent people she admires. She has said her print, Father Ram, honors her father. I wonder if Father Ram 2, below, represents the same person

On the right, paintings and video by Kim Anno. Anno's painting, while abstract, hints at a narrative just beyond our cognizance, or at least that's what it feels like to me. Whether working in oil on aluminum or photography or video, she's incorporating light--reflected, recorded--as an integral element of the image

Kate Javens, Father Ram 2, 2007, oil on linen, 9 x 10 inches

Kim Anno, Styx, 2010, oil on aluminum, 67 x 45 inches

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Continuing around the gallery we come to Katherine Taylor's work. Narratively, Taylor is interpreting events of devastation or the process of decay. She records these scenes with a combination of detachment (the perspective) and passion (the brushwork)

Katherine Taylor, Indexical View/Twin Palms, 2009, oil on canvas, 60 x 48 inches

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Next to Taylor's work is that of Tim McDowell, whose Kingdom Come solo we glimpsed earlier in the post. Moving around to the next wall, we see paintings by Don Pollack. I think of him as a realist with a fauvist heart and fantastist's sensibility. What look like four framed photographs are actually oil-on-panel landscape paintings, a lovely bit of illusion within illusion.

Below, Pollack's Untitled 574, 2007, oil on canvas, 48 x 60 inches

Next posts: The new season in New York

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