A curator takes the stage.
Alex Ross is a pretentious prick. And thank God. The Santa Fe-based critic and emerging curator has such a classically intellectual approach to visual art that he frequently is mocked for his $5 words and the intricately laced conceptual framework through which he develops and translates the meaning of art.
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In its preview of the Ross-curated exhibition,
Debris D'Atelier
, Pasatiempo called Ross' curatorial statement "complex," which is merely a $2 word and, possibly, an understatement. This is not to agree that Ross' pretense is derisively complex, but rather confirms that he is representing what he proposes are key aspects of a whole system. There is, within art, a complexity that mirrors and exchanges with the other complex systems we take for granted.
Ross' language is only bothersome when he works too hard to justify the work's merit or takes the consideration of art's impact on culture too seriously.
Ross better acquits himself when he grounds his exhibition historically in the Arte Povera tradition and explains that he sought out artists working with detritus and discard to develop "new connections and affinities among the peripheral materials of lived experience."
If it still is not clear that Ross touches on the artist's treatment of found material and also suggests an increasing relevance to such work in an era when the average American generates nearly a ton of garbage annually, well, a translator might be beneficial.
To that end, there are the four artists who are divided by their direct and indirect use of detritus. Hannah Hughes and Wendy Heldmann create images that portray refuse and discards, while Cristina de los Santos and Nicole E Danti use actual repurposed materials.
Hughes' photographs are the first to greet viewers. The two works effectively captivate, elongating the space into her landscapes of swept studio dirt and sequins. In this case, the
debris
is
d'atelier
, as the sequins are telltale signs of Hughes' mixed-media efforts, which tend to balance craft materials-by turns flashy and dottering-with fad, splash and branding. Thus, she captures the psychic but equitable detritus of contemporary life. Her images literalize the curatorial conceit and provide textural relief with smooth, photographic surfaces.
Heldmann paints in acrylic on paper to mixed results. Her series,
Mostly What
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It Was
, appears to document a shifting morass of studio items-chairs, stretcher bars, strange but potentially useful objects-as they rearrange and reform over an unknowable span of time. Heldmann's innate sense of composition combines with a commanding quality of line and a delicate treatment of paint to create rich, brusque, colored sketches. But sketches they remain, never blossoming beyond studies; they feel like a fallback the artist counts on when the blank sheet is otherwise too daunting. Extended meaning feels forced by the curator's assurances; it is one of those instances when his language overtakes him…"fissured psychogeography" indeed.
Working here on hardware-display paint chips, de Los Santos spans one corner of the space with an onslaught of multiple drawings. Ross' insistence on using paint samples as the basis for a flurry of small sketches that imply the notion of color as a Duchampian ready-made is clever, but I have seen paint samples used to better effect on many occasions. A better work by de los Santos is "Pink Machine," which takes a lithograph of her own (which is now presumably detritus) and uses it as a much more effective pre-made surface upon which to draw and collage with small white sticker labels. The work's color, texture and plumbing of time and process all conspire to lend a more credible substance.
The space at Cruz is possibly better suited to the work of one artist and Ross might have done well to work exclusively with Danti. Ross' premise of reuse and "upcycling the discarded into a foundation for artistic possibilities" has been made hackneyed by recycled art exhibitions; his argument is for a more considered dialogue that surpasses trash art. Such a proposal was recently put forth when the New Museum in New York inaugurated its recently completed building with the exhibition
unmonumental
.
Of the artists here, Danti's would have been most welcome there. Her work epitomizes the New Musuem's assertion of "a world in pieces and a parallel impulse in artmaking." Danti's instinct for color and form that pique contemporary sensibilities as potential and confounding signifiers would have been welcome to consume more, or less, of the space available.
But the works of the four artists do ultimately stand as mutually complementary, and they do substantiate Ross' aesthetics, whether one subscribes to his conceits or not. He argues that the work points toward the "precarious and contingent." It is possible that such words more aptly describe the construct that surrounds the exhibition. Such experiments are worth promoting and defending, with whatever words be in one's arsenal, regardless of dollar value.
