Post 38: A few things from The Pond Froze Over at Procession Gallery

One wall of The Pond Froze Over

The other day, I dashed into what was a radiant and sensitive show up at Procession Gallery, The Pond Froze Over. I stepped through the space with the slightness and waver of a pencil’s line--just in the way that the space’s atmosphere compelled me to; you could not step boldly through the room for you would drown out the sound of the works--quivering as they were as though (or perhaps they actually were) balancing on a singular spot of softness.

Early in my arrival, in the midst of getting my bearings, I happened to turn around and face the outside that I came from, and there happened to be someone out there, on the other side of the street, tagging, with black spray paint, a few objects that were leaning against the brick side wall of a building. This filled me with glee. It fulfilled the strange rareness of witnessing someone mark-make while being surrounded by mark-making in the past tense--unwitnessed marks already having been made.

These few thoughts are a product of my quick visit, resulting memory (and memory snapshots) of, and the unfortunately few photos I took, thoughts (of taking photos on phone) and hands (for pulling out phone) overpowered as they were by the experience my eyes were having. The show was made up of works all quite small, feeling altogether like a collection--a collection of items like stamps or buttons or fallen leaves; things gathered and customarily put away for safe-keeping, but now here, spread out for others' eyes to see. This is to say it was as though the show was some one person's collection, and that to be seeing it was to be seeing something personal, something maybe only having all been seen by one individual’s eyes up until now, a product of different places visited by them, of different chance findings they found. Glances glimpsed. This show made me want to turn a building into a piece of paper.

Three-ish works:

1.

    Ana Grace Neifeld

This pairing of painting and object leaves me breathless. Truly it does. Two different worlds: painting, having conjured a wholly new (new because partially imagined?) image within the space of a canvas and object, a form taking up three-dimensional space (possibly having existed long before the painting as this object looks like it may have been found, or that it may have held meaning in another domain--perhaps as a tool) painted on (paint on an object as a different kind of addition than paint on a canvas--the difference between forming and altering). Two different worlds though registering in sight as if there is a passageway between them, as if they can each hear the other--not only that, but that a message, at this moment, is actively being shared through the conduit. Two simplicities converge, different sets of numbers add to the same sum. I see this pair as a feeling. The day after visiting the show I watched the pairs figure skating short program at the Olympics and saw these two above works by Ana Grace Neifeld in these two skaters from Hungary:

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2. 

Caleb Stoltzfus

Again, my breath speeds. Breath, breathing, pace, and rhythm take the place of the thinking system entirely--thinking hadn’t occurred to me. What kind of event causes the hardship that is thinking? I feel shy to state the beauty that this object presents. (The appearance of beauty is quiet and genuine, but the statement of beauty is loud and glitzy?) It is earnestly here, in the sumptuous but sober colors (gentle shades applied with freedom), the openings in the cardboard’s corrugated edges (little air pockets within the healthy swashes of paint), the sense of the object as the enveloper of its own self (in some form, its own caretaker), it’s in the way I just stare at it. At the front of the gallery were copies of a little publication called The Goose Egg. In them, a line from Ana Grace Neifeld about beauty that occurs to me now: “Postmodern art often appeals to the intellect over the senses because of a distrust of beauty. I believe each of our senses is an entry point which connects us to the world and that to please the senses amplifies our connectedness to the world. The Postmodern attack on the sublime is an attack on transcendence.” Is to state the presence of beauty to ask to be trusted? Although, isn’t an inherent part of beauty the way the open declaration of it lands with definitive strength and certainty? On this very same “next day” that I watched the Olympic pairs, in fact as I was walking home to do so, I spotted a lock dangling off of the yellow base of a steam funnel. Look at how much the angle of the piece of metal that the lock hangs from resembles the end of the cardboard “branch” that protrudes furthest into the center of Caleb's dioramic structure:

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3. 

Cory Pigeon

I looked up to see this painting and saw in my mind the formation of an “oh.” The word feels like a mirror image of what the painting looks like. Both are concentrated, condensed, regular, and have a touch of funny to them. The more I look the more I see Cory Pigeon’s painting as a suppression of a laugh. The few areas of muted color--a mauve, murky green, and foggy pink for instance--and the low-detail forms (flat shapes with easy-going edges) do much of the work of withholding, though there are a few tickle-y moments that sneak through: the rendering of the three black bottle caps (bounce, bounce, bounce) and the off to the side spot where four black rings of a tan spiral notebook peak out from behind a four-sided shape in green-screen green. (On the picture plane, the notebook snippet functions how the bottle caps do--as a small hat to a larger below-shape.) It was surprising to realize how much I mostly am not able to pinpoint the specific items this painting recreates--the things I know must be familiar objects (they all pose familiarly) are recognizable in outline but anonymous in name. Recognizable in togetherness but anonymous in singularity. Isn’t that how a painting should be--containing singularity but refraining from naming it? Lo and behold, the “next day” also produced this sight:

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What to make of the world so quickly delivering on the three works in this show that I took photos of? Continuations, reminders, responses? And: How do the sights of these works on display for their createdness (many things in the world are created in different senses of the word, though I see galleries as specifically presenting created forms as created forms) compare to the creatednesses that are unacknowledged as such (the figure skating pair, the dangling lock, the spray bottle on top of paper towel roll stack)? What makes these works in The Pond Froze Over infiltrate the world in very different configurations, or, what has the world reflecting back moments of the works?