Smiling left, right, and all over, Eric Anthony Berdis
Featured works
Rick Albee
Eric Anthony Berdis
Matthew Best
Daniel Bohman
Shelby Charlesworth
Douglas Degges
Amy Faris
EK Lee
Cynthia Mason
Elizabeth Mead
Robert Oehl
Anne Russinof
Joseph Salerno
Jean Scott
Rita Valley
Claire Watson
BRIAN SLATTERY : NEW HAVEN INDEPENDENT
Artists Work Out The Daily Grind | January 30, 2020
SHARON BUTLER : TWO COATS OF PAINT
The Daily | January 12, 2020
Curator’s Statement
The work selected for this exhibition is rooted in materiality, ritual, and the structure of daily life.
Some artists have built enduring practices one day at a time (as Bill W. would say). One is Joseph Salerno, who makes a small plein air landscape painting each day in the Vermont woods. Other artists represented here, such as Jean Scott and EK Lee, have suggested that maintaining the daily ritual of making art has a healing effect in the face of loss and tragedy. In Salerno’s artist’s statement, he quotes Dante from The Divine Comedy: “In the middle years of our life I found myself in a dark wood.”
Incremental approaches, of course, need not suppress humanity. Claire Watson collects leather clothes at thrift shops, takes them apart at the seams, and sews the pieces together to create abstract canvases. Although they have a Modernist sensibility, Watson says it’s impossible to disassociate the fragments from the living, breathing animals from whence the skins originated.
Matthew Best uses the painting process as a way to cope with the sheer uncertainty of life, his improvisational abstract works recording mental shifts and personal growth, move by move. Anne Russinof’s paintings are themselves single acts: she makes them in one go, wet on wet, like the ancient Chinese landscape painters. Her floating calligraphic gestures seem as if they could fly off the canvas and enter the space around us.
Daniel Bohman, Shelby Charlesworth, and Amy Faris are keen observers of the domestic world. Charlesworth’s installations incorporate what she calls the repulsive traces of existence – hair intertwined in the teeth of a brush, a toothbrush long overused, a toenail stuck in a set of clippers. Faris’s drawings and installations examine monotony, utilizing the same repetitive processes she associates with tedious household tasks. Daniel Bohman paints images of interior domestic spaces which convey meaning about those who inhabit them.
Three artists in the exhibition use materials in especially surprising ways. Cynthia Mason’s soft sculptures, based on household objects like shelves and ladders, droop and bend over time. Her interest lies in powerlessness and everyday failure. Rick Albee’s humble goal for his small-scale ceramic objects is simply to make something unexpected, and, by combining familiar forms in unforeseen ways, he succeeds. Elizabeth Mead makes delicate tabletop objects out of white paper and string, then photographs them in natural light, rendering them illusions of shadow and light in a post-literal space.
Douglas Degges and Robert Oehl, both overwhelmed by the speed of digital technology in our lives, are intent on slowing down the existential procession. Oehl uses pinhole cameras and traditional darkroom processes to fashion grainy, nude self-portraits that seem elegiac, suggestions that an era may be ending. Degges craftslumpy plaster slabs on which he makes abstract paintings, like personal frescos for itinerant times.
Rita Valley and Eric Anthony Berdis have proudly political missions. Using absurd pageantry and purposeful repetition, Berdis explores the challenge and romance of being gay in a hetero-normative society. Valley, in despair over our ongoing political strife, hand-sews text-based fabric pieces with buzz phrases and hate words like “libtard” and “complicit.”
“The Daily” is broadly about paying attention, living in the present, and counting time – which of course marches on. Sixty seconds in a minute, sixty minutes in an hour, twenty-four hours in a day. Before you know it, a brave new decade unfolds.
—Sharon Butler
