Review
COMFORT STUDIES
Pamela Landry and Les Newman
Runs until February 12
The New Gallery
Review
CANOPY
Penelope Stewart
Runs until February 12
Stride Gallery
This is a month of breakups and emotional collapses. If you’re feeling raw and on the verge, it might be wise to take a tonic at The New Gallery (TNG) and Stride Gallery.
Comfort Studies at TNG is an exhibition featuring the work of Pamela Landry and Les Newman.
Newman’s works are idle diagrams illustrating the inner workings of – among other things – sadness and disappointment, with the aid of a low-res illustration technique recalling early Commodore 64 graphics programs. The suite of works is titled Science Drawings; each photograph illustrates and lists a pithy phrase, usually a "reference to a pop-song lyric, self-help passage, or other popism/truism," according to Newman’s artist’s statement. Some featured phrases include: "going, going, gone" and "everything to everyone, something to someone, nothing to no one," graphically representing the finer points of feeling pretty horrible in the fashion of a pixilated chemistry overhead transparency. It’s brooding and cynical, with gut-wrenching and hilarious effect.
The large, plush sculptural forms of Landry are meant to be touched – and touched all over: they have pockets, nubbly bits and orifices. Just the remedy for a season when one begins to feel a little more like an inanimate clump of ice than a human being with emotional needs. Not only can you touch these forms, but they will also talk back to you, offering snippets of pleasured phrasing. Landry notes in her statement that "technology arouses, at once, fascination and fear." Her work plays with this transition between comfort and vulnerability, and that is why it is successful. Viewers are asked to confront the work, and then develop a very intimate relation with it – essentially one where they caress the objects like a lover. But Landry pulls no punches. The work responds (literally) with the same sincerity that its masseurs invest in it. You’ll be charmed by the perversity of the whole experience, or joyfully satisfied in its wholesome warmth – depending on how you approach it. If your current beau or belle has become somewhat surly of late, Landry’s objects might just be a suitable replacement.
Also of note and on display until mid-February is Penelope Stewart’s Canopy, a sweeping and elegant work installed at the Stride Gallery.
Walking into the place under crisp winter light is a bit like entering a dead-empty cathedral. Near the entrance, small handheld mirrors are available for viewers to use when observing the work. Why might mirrors be necessary? Because the work is above your head, hung from cables stretched across the span of the ceiling. Printed on a massive canopy are hazy, translucent images of architectural vaulting, curling effortlessly above the heads of (doubtless) entranced, neck-bent guests. Not so different from Baroque illusionist painting, Stewart noted in sparkling conversation. This is spectral work – but rather than haunt you, the artist hopes the work will offer a sense of relief from despair, and that it might provide a sense of safety. |
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