The two-person show of luminous abstract wall works at Atlantic Gallery offers viewers a dynamic sensory experience where light, shadow and unexpected materials form a conversation about how we see and engage with the world.
Dance the Distance: Anne Berlit and Michele Foyer at Atlantic Gallery.
Curated by Suzan Shutan. It runs through March 23, 2025
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Do you need a break from the data morass? I know that I do. So, sometimes, I love to walk into an art gallery and simply look around. You’ll find, however, that it takes a conscious effort to kindly ignore artist statements, work titles, front desk dialogue and other obstacles that may litter your path to aesthetic enlightenment in a sacred space made not only for artwork but for you—and how you see.
Your job as a viewer requires accepting the vision of your unique eyes—and other important sense perceptions—in order to stay in tune. You could say it’s a primary part of our survival. The use and dynamics of those principal perceptions are bigger than all the big ideas that even the biggest artists could dream up and broadcast. Our engagement with the world starts perceptually—and this goes on perpetually. The advent of cultural conceits and philosophical inquiry, of course, comes after. At the end of the day, our perceptions can be dressed up with promising narrative concerns, but we can’t get around our reconciliation with perception. And because perceptions vary so greatly among us, it’s important not only to accept them, but to embrace their palpable presence and lessons.
The best route towards that embrace, I believe, is to prompt your viewing audience to get involved, to look carefully and to experience the art at hand—instead of merely reading it like a book. And so, the work of Anne Berlit and Michele Foyer does just that in the new exhibition Dance the Distance, testing our perception and ideas of what art is in ways we might not expect.
Upon a cursory glance, you may say these artists follow a modern tradition. Each seemingly makes discrete wall art that hangs in white cube galleries. Not that there is a single sinful regression with that scenario, but today’s high-tech, immersion-ready audiences often want more, like outsized hyperkinetic events that dazzle and delight, instead of merely meeting human-scale art halfway in real-time and, well, dancing with it closely—like a partner. Berlit and Foyer, luckily, offer such intimate works. Most are made of materials that range from curled and colored heavyweight paper stock to unassuming industrial plastic sheeting—and, importantly, light—both apparently emanating from within the works and that which reflects upon the works. Of course, with light, comes its sister, shadow.
A humble, though curious work in the show that whispered to me—about both light and shadow—is Anne Berlit’s Homage to the Square VII, made of Plexiglas and acrylic paint. The title, which I avoided reading until the end of the show, is, of course, a nod to the famous Homage to the Square series that iconic 20th-century painter Josef Albers obsessed over and served for nearly 25 years. But unlike his careful, symmetric stack of perfect, flat, color-family-friendly, palette-knived squares, Berlit has masked and brush-painted stripes of discordant yellow, purple and white, which float on top of a Plexiglas box—casting shadows and giving the overall work some depth, expressing its value as an object in our space more than an idea about hue grades. In some ways, Berlit defies Albers’s motivation to utilize his intentionally unnatural, uniform, signature shape. She does this by highlighting its edges, opening space we can see between painted strokes and, with that, reminding us that the work hangs on hardware and rests upon a wall—indirectly revealing the meta “magic” of art exhibitions, as well as identifying our complicit gaze and various perceptions.
Across the way is a piece that I could not take my eyes off by Berlit’s show partner, Michele Foyer, entitled Everything for the Travelers from 2023. Lovingly crafted from a layered panoply of gorgeous hand-painted paper, the ruffled, dimensional wall work is like the scaled side of an otherworldly reptile on the run. Gradients of seafoam and teal and olive follow bends and curls in the patches of heavy paper substrate, which give the work even more depth than shadows between layers leave us. But she’s done an interesting thing here. On the back of the low-floating work, the artist has applied fluorescent magenta paint, which bounces off the white wall behind, bathing the perimeter in an unmistakable glow—like an inner-breathing light of life. It gives me pause to wonder about the artist’s process, the work’s construction and how I perceive its being after I leave the gallery—as if it were an animal ready to escape captivity. As with her other works in the show, Everything for the Travelers is neither a painting nor a sculpture and not exactly an installation. It is a work on the wall that collects and reflects light and color, twists and bends and changes with the weather, adjusting as needed. This is perhaps a lesson that we must all heed: to bend—and not break—during these uncertain times.
On the far wall of the gallery hangs a large, luminous, show-stopping work by Berlit entitled Lifelines. It’s created from an obsolete polycarbonate film called LISA and, like Foyer’s work, emanates a distinct glow. Bent and pinned by nails at precise points on the wall, it looks like the long curvy course of an enchanting day-glow circulatory system. This remarkable piece offers a sneaky sense-perception trip. As I try to seek order and find the starting point of this impossible circular maze, I soon get lost and mesmerized in the tides and turns of the piece. The oodles of noodly orange plastic strips begin to look like abstract bodily and cellular forms, which seem to be bumping, grinding and undulating—if you look at them long enough.
Foyer’s Given #3, larger than her other works in the show, is a coarse and jagged tapestry of frayed rectangles and orbs of paper in earthy chocolates, oranges, bronzes and cremes—with one huge, red-hot, irregular rectangle that both weighs down and sets fire to the real estate on the right side of the piece. The work in some ways resembles a series of loose county plots stitched into a pulsating state thermal map. Another of Foyer’s works, Quitclaim, perhaps alluding to a metaphoric renunciation of terra firma—that is, no fixed ground but rather the act of melting and moving and loosely joining—seems to connect to this piece, with its similar heaving tectonic-like plates of paper. In addition to these allusions, much of Foyer’s work gives delight to the eyes, and for synesthetes, other senses intricately tied to that primary perception needed for such lively layered art absorption.
The formal relationship among the artists’ works in Dance the Distance creates an interesting viewer experience. Berlit’s nearly austere, painted, Plexiglas boxes and gorgeous wavy network of fluorescent film are an ostensible 180° contrast to Foyer’s sharded, organic, high-density paper reliefs. The former seems to redefine and update some of the established rules, media and formats of Modernism, while the latter is focused on the multisensory feelings of her creative experience and its relocation to the viewing audience. Both artists present systems and networks, groups and gatherings, as well as the tethering of life’s layered relationships—but also their breakdown, sometimes identifying the arbitrary value we have assigned and supported them with. Of course, ultimately, light is a big star in this show. It reflects and refracts all that we see. Without our primary sight, and other interconnected perceptions, we could gather none of the cues here that enable us, as viewers, to appreciate not only the relationships of the work at hand but the vital relationships that make up our lives.
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Dance the Distance at Atlantic Gallery
Anne Berlit and Michele Foyer
Curated by Suzan Shutan
March 11-23, 2025
548 W. 28th Street, #540
New York, NY 10001
About the writer: Stephen Wozniak is a visual artist, writer and actor based in Los Angeles. His work has been exhibited in the Bradbury Art Museum, Leo Castelli Gallery and Lincoln Center, read in the Observer, The Baltimore Sun and the Whitehot Magazine of Contemporary Art and seen on Star Trek: Enterprise, NCIS: Los Angeles and the Emmy Award-nominated Time Machine: Beyond the Da Vinci Code, among others. He earned a B.F.A. from Maryland Institute College of Art and attended Johns Hopkins University. Websites: https://stephenwozniakart.com and https://stephenwozniak.com Instagram: @thestephenwozniak and @stephenwozniakart