In the three person show Aggregate at Studio 9D, artists Sammy Bennett, Bradley Milligan, and James Bertucci channel New York streetscapes and detritus to relay an earnest and affecting impression of the city. Bertucci’s trompe l’oeil paintings, Bennett’s fabric installation, and Milligan’s rugged sculptures overlap in a reverence for craftsmanship. Labor and construction are this show’s subject and, in many ways, its medium. In its use of material and representation Aggregate is boldly literal in its translation of the city’s chaos and beauty.
As an artist-run space, Studio 9D makes a fitting home for this scrappy show. Even the brevity of the two-week runtime underscores the blink-and-you-miss-it changeover within our own neighborhoods. In appropriating orange construction netting, and ramshackle scaffolding within their works, the artists capture New York’s insatiable growth. By exporting this proletarian, utilitarian aesthetic from their Brooklyn studios to Chelsea, the artists reinfest the gallery space with its industrial origins.
Studio 9D’s layout—a small entryway opening into a large room—favors the tentative peeking of navigating sidewalk detours and busy intersections. The main attractions are hung out of sight from the entryway, allowing for a big reveal when venturing into the room.
Rounding that corner, we’re greeted by Sammy Bennett’s massive patchwork Last Wash 7:00 P.M, which dominates the space. Spanning a whole corner of the room, the billowing facade hangs a few chain-links from the ceiling and pools onto the floor. The stitched wall forms an obtuse angle onto the rest of the show, accentuating the installation’s totality.
Last Wash 7:00 P.M builds off the found fabric of a Bushwick laundromat’s temporary vestibule. Behind its plastic window, Bennett has sculpted a staggered washing machine. $5.50 reads the green-painted digital display. Sheesh! The artist knows that his presence drives prices up. On all sides of this central panel, and even on the floor, he plays with the building’s interior and exterior scenes in mixes of found objects, soft sculptures, and printed surfaces. The swirl of perspectives between windows and bricks, between personal items and litter, describes New York’s pension for publicizing the personal, and the ways we claim shared spaces as our own. The billowing textiles soften the show’s unabashed masculinity.
Turning around, I was captured by a salon wall of what appeared to be a mix of paintings and found objects. That carpenter Milligan must have snatched a panel of hunter-green construction plywood, I thought. That’s perhaps the only trick the show plays; I had the dumbfounding moment of noticing the uniform linen edges on each piece and realized I was looking at some 16 of James Bertucci’s photorealistic paintings.
In using oil or acrylic to render urban surfaces that themselves are layered with safety yellow, spray-painted hash marks, or rust Bertucci investigates the act and utility of mark making, of applying paint, of caring for surfaces. The largest, Slab(II), a convincing crop of a concrete barrier measures 32 x 25 inches; just big enough to overtake our head, without overpowering. In their modest scale, the paintings magnify small moments, the mesmerizing textures of daily life. Diamond plating, metal grates, construction fencing—these works isolate the dense rhythms of and angles of industrial material, suggesting that construction itself demands elegy.
Such thickets come to life in Bradley Milligan’s reassembled fresco fragments. Take the exploded billboard, Down the River. Milligan foregrounds the hulking signpost structure and the tendinous wooden junctures that hold the cracked painted plaster together. The work embodies resilience in both rupture and repair.
At their human size these works both anchor and populate the exhibition. To circle these full bodied sculptures, is to appreciate their balance of raw material and negative space. They invite the type of close looking at the heart of this show. Consider the tree-like convexity Mailbag at the entrance. We’re able to see through the exposed wooden joinery, but not quite within the hollow. It calls over to the freestanding Scrimmage in the rear corner.
In walking around Scrimmage, we can see the entire show through the artwork’s network of joinery. The room starts looking like a Bertucci canvas or a Bennett composition, or a shifting vision of the streets we walk every day. New York’s endurance and constant change come into focus, and in this way we begin to experience the show and our city on Aggregate’s terms.
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All photos courtesy of Flaneurshan.studio
Aggregate at Studio 9D
November 9-24, 2024
About the writer: Queens based artist Will Kaplan combines different mediums, techniques, and text to probe boundaries. In addition to his studio practice he reviews new music and documents the city’s art scene. Kaplan has had several solo show in venues such as Bob’s Gallery in Bushwick, and on Governors Island. His work has appeared at Spring/Break Art Fair, the New Art Dealers Alliance, and Pete’s Candy Store. He has written for Passing Notes and Foofaraw Press.