A not-so-frozen moment at Underground.
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Artists have a lot of trouble finding middle ground. They seem to either make too much money or not enough. They take themselves too seriously or not seriously enough. They can produce a tight, cohesive body of work or they can't. Basically, artists tend to operate within extremes, either excelling or sucking entirely. It's rare to find hard-working artists who produce modest, quality work with reliable consistency.
Now, I like Rocky Lewycky's work. It's proven to be more or less tried-and-true in the past, but knowing that his new work dealt with time and the artist's own blood was almost enough to keep me away. I was afraid that it would be the new-millennium, sensitive-man version of 1980s feminist art. Bloody sheets, ticking clocks, symbolically wounded birds; horrible, overt and uncomfortable to be near. Remembered, if at all, with a shudder.
But Lewycky's concepts and materials are expertly used with nary a shudder to be found. Underground Gallery, a Marcy Street basement, is a tricky space to work in. It's small, it's low, it has added character in the form of a supporting pillar and various nooks, crannies and trap doors that are suitable for disposing of bodies.
Although he worked for a time from Santa Fe, Lewycky is currently based in Southern California. For his return exhibition, he received detailed plans of the basement gallery and the building that surrounds it. In studying the plans, Lewycky was able to recognize a golden-mean configuration in the construction and arranged his exhibition to navigate the echo of those proportions. Underground's short history has seen some fun, enterprising and exciting shows, but nothing with the planned elegance that Lewycky demonstrates.
Upon passing through the hallway entry gallery and turning into the primary space, one first sees brackets mounted to the room's support column. Small stacks of paper-pages really-are on top of the brackets. In the background, against the far wall, are more stacks, height and proximity to the gallery's existing elements well-considered. To the right, one large monotone drawing is pinned to the wall with porcelain drawer pulls, and to the left, a quiet, long piece wraps from one wall to the next, forming a horizontal arc at the room's corner. On the floor is a rectangular slab, 300 pounds, of unfired clay, with a smaller rectangle of furious, spiky pulls lifting the material in its center, like moist ceramic fire. Immediately to the right, on the floor below a street-level window, sits a stack of large, yellow paper sheets that mimic the window's proportions and splash the room with color. It is quiet, spare and soothing. The room hums with knife-edged presence, with the balance between contrasting elements and the small puzzles that each piece hints at containing.
The key to unlocking each puzzle is some aspect of time. In the case of the large drawing, Lewycky had to invest considerable time, taking several years and at least 150 pens to slowly scrawl an iconic, flat, monotone ***image2***representation of Monet's "Grain Stacks, End of Summer (1890)." Monet's grain-stack paintings were made in different seasons and during both morning and evening, as the artist attempted to capture the relationship
of time to light. Though Lewycky's obsessive drawing thrums with light and contrast transitions itself, he utilizes Monet as icon and a dynamic historical reference that he intends to contain within another perception of time. Each element of the work, including the use of the porcelain pulls, implies a specific notion of time.
The giant slab of clay with its upchurned spires is fresh and shiny at the time of the opening reception but will dry and begin to transform in color and texture over the duration of the exhibition. The long horizontal piece that wraps a corner is an investigation about how much information may be conveyed or processed in a minute. The size and marks convey exactly that space of time. The stack of yellow sheets, an homage to Wolfgang Laib in form, and a personal meditative installation for the artist, exudes time in its open and meticulous process.
As for the pages that are stacked on small, fabricated brackets, a closer look reveals a single cylinder rising up through the center of each cluster. The cylinders are made from beeswax and the aforementioned artist's own blood. There are some strange and perhaps unintended penetration insinuations involved with the structure of these works, but looking deeper reveals more profound and philosophical motivations. The stacks of pages are precisely numbered, and precisely sized, with the space around the central cylinder gauged precisely and changing in ordered increments. The beeswax and the iron content in the blood is intended to leech, over a period of decades, into the paper, altering the nature of the works, depending in part on the clearances. Eventually, the pages might be removed from their stacks and rearranged to form a new time-based wall work.
Lewycky's earnestness, his commitment to simple, well-conceived and well-executed works, and his diligent assessment of how best to use the space sets the bar for future shows at Underground, and for artists who are too greedy for wall space with sloppy works. There is a middle ground and, from it, all things are possible.
