Eva Mayhabal Davis in dialogue with Art Spiel – Beyond the Pale
Installation view of Beyond the Pale by Zac Hacmon. Image courtesy of the artist. Photo by Etienne Frossard
Zac Hacmon‘s sound sculptures at the intimate Border project space are overpowering in size, as if cutting the air with their sharp diagonal tiled lines to create a sense of suffocating sterility. Their oddity is intriguing and repelling simultaneously, and their placement in the room forces the visitor to navigate around with considerate effort. The sound consists of a series of stories recorded at the Arizona-Mexico border, and adds another layer of urgency, creating altogether an inspired fusion of sound/form. Eva Mayhabal Davis, the curator of Beyond the Pale , elaborates on the premise behind the show.
Microscope Gallery, Underdonk, Transmitter, TSA New York, Studio 10, Amos Eno, The Border Project Space, Green Door Gallery, Scholes Street Studio
Microscope Gallery, Underdonk, Transmitter, TSA New York
Above are just a handful of hints and glimpses of notions of formal analogousness I noted among four quite different works by four different artists in four different excellent exhibits, all of which opened at the 1329 Willoughby building in Bushwick on the same night earlier this month.
At top left, an instant of a video involving a ‘vectorial world’ by Lisa Gwilliam & Ray Sweeten at Microscope Gallery . At top right, one of Amy Butowicz‘s amusingly alt-quotidian metamorphs in her bizarrely joyous solo show at Underdonk . This piece in particular seemed immediately suggestive of Humpty Dumpty’s pants, or The Penguin’s pants, or the pants worn by some bloviating politician in a parodical caricature by Daumier. I’m not sure if they’re supposed to be anything of the sort. I am sure I want pants, or I guess culottes, of just that sort. Moving along, the painting to which those pants, or maybe ‘pants,’ point is by Alessandro Keegan. It’s one of several strong works he’s showing in “Heed,” a winning two-person show at Transmitter that features also very strong work by Angela Hiesch . At bottom left, a sculpture that seemed to imply a distilled tincture of time frozen still in atemporal liquid motion, or something of such a strangely wordable sort, in “Object of Desire,” a large group show curated by Amanda Martinez at TSA .
