A Group Show Curated by Joey Frank
Ok fine, it’s a Fall show. The leaves fall from a tree and their paths are driven by the wind. The large bronze leaf at the center of this show stands upright, greets the viewer as they enter the show. The shape of this enlarged fig leaf comes from the V&A Museum in London, where it was carved in 1857 to cover the penis of a newly aquired to-scale replica of Michelangelo’s David. Queen Victoria wanted a leaf to cover the nudity, which she felt a distraction from the rest of the sculpture’s figure. In Lina McGinn’s artwork, the fig leaf itself is the figure, and for this group show, let’s call it fig. 1. The curation treats this sculpture as an extended metaphor, or aconceit around which the ideas in the show swirl. McGinn’s sculpture allows you to look behind the leaf and see the carved negative space dick imprint of where the leaf sat on David.
Leaf and relief.
It’s hard to know which works to discuss first. the install became asort of constellation of interrelated artworks around the nucleus of McGinn’s fig leaf. Oji Haynes’ Pearl faces the leaf directly as a giant, the David assembled from discarded objects, surfaces of drums are potential heart beats. Then two artworks swirling behind the leaf: Rachel Rossin’s seven foot plastic Massaccio’s and Arinze Umenyiora’s Divine Intervention are abstractions that hide references to biblical Adam, both his creation and his expulsion from Eden. Flanking the leaf on the walls are sensual reliefs: Alix Vernet’s aluminum casting of a male nude torso holding the hilt of his sword on his belly, and the milled relief — a male montage by Java Jones entitled Motion.
The most futuristic connection with the Victorian impulse of needing a modesty fig leaf comes in the generative Ai processes of Briar Smith. Briar reverse engineered unsolicited Grindr dick picks to visualize how the rest of the men might actually look. Any summary of a show about a leaf could start with trees, the 36 fauvist feeling water colors that Tessa Perutz has been painting outside in parks around New York hang on horizontal mirrors and face an Ivin Ballin piled fiberglass canvas, littered with avocados and ginger. The overall mindset of oblique connections, literary, historical and animal, are in the grid of virtuosic Atticus Bergman crayon drawings. Bergman works with densely applied Crayola crayon, and scratching various detail with the end of a bent paperclip. The material evokes schoolchildren and they are hung without glass so you can go right up and sniff them.
At noon on November 15, the art group Riddle’s will stage Ask Equestion, a project where two mini therapy horses Aiden and Pearl will visit the show. They will inspect the art. They will provide emotional relief by their very presence as they are trained to do. They will participate in an art historical dialog from George Stubbs to Jannis Kounellis to that show I saw ten years ago at Metro Pictures by Andreas Slominski with an empty gallery and horse semen spattered on the wall. During their visit, the mini-horses will be rendered in oil paint by Tom Koehler and Nick Jorgensen, who have been horsing around with plein air painting. These final artworks will be hung in a zone with Caroline Weinstock’s languidly expressive replacement dogs, Karla Zurita’s salt lick looking catgirl, Kea de Buretel’s sentient ceramics on four wheeled pedestals, and a slew of new paintings by James English Leary that he has made since becoming a licensed and practicing therapist. On a quiet visit you can hear music generated from the Tommy Martinez stained glass hexagonal boxes housing flickering LED tea candles.
It wasn’t my intention, but if I mention Siebren Versteeg’s digital classic Today’s Paper, where he’s always holding and updated front page, and late entries by Ryan Foerster and myself, this pressrelease or curatorial statement has lightly brushed on almost Every Driven Leaf.
— Joey Frank, November 2024
