Photo Story
The group exhibition titled Those Who Tend at the Warnes Contemporary in Brooklyn is an occasion in which 22 artists come together to celebrate their shared philosophy towards work and life. The title refers to the fact that all the artists here care for others in one form or another, whether they are parents of young children, grownups caring for their elderly parents, or supporting staff for people with disabilities.
Kotler Anya exhibits a figurative work titled, Never Alone IV (2024), made of paper mache and graphite drawing. The work, by the juxtaposed nature of the double forms, suggests a nearby spiritual presence of a loved one who had passed away. The lines boxing in the figure suggest a hypercube, which is a 4-dimensional cube theoreticized for the higher dimensions.
Looking at Beach Barry’s Stacked Wood (2024), we find a combined sculpture or assemblage of reclaimed wood, paperboard, and foam on plywood. The recycled nature of the work reminds us of a book from the 90s, providing a moral lesson for children to fix their broken toys rather than discarding them and buying brand new toys.
Ana Maria Farina and Hanna Washburn’s Hold onto Your Treasures (2024) is a collaborative piece made of recycled fabric textiles, fibers, thread, and plastic. The work is multi-layered, with the plush frame surrounding the knitted, transparent plastic container, which in turn carries a knitted object, similar to a checkerboard. It pays homage to the women artists who pioneered the arts of textiles and quilts, and alludes to the onion-like psychology of domestic spaces and their occupants.
Kara Patrowicz’s Parallel Play (2023) is a visually colorful and tactilely joyful piece made of felting with wool, fabric, and dryer lint. It depicts two babies at play, surrounded by toys and protected by their loving guardians. Whether the viewer is being nurtured or doing the nurturing, whether the perspective is that of the children or their parents, the space is markedly stable and safe from the external unknowns. It is the power of love that fiats the safety of the loved ones, as if it were the law, made unbreakable by the pure will of the loving.
Cristina Cornier’s The Water Bearer (2024) is an oil painting highlighting the efforts of a loving mother becoming more than a bear, in bearing the waters for her and her neighbors’ children. The trees in the background lean sideways to form a stable triangular composition, similar to Paul Cezanne’s The Bathers (1898 – 1905). The rendering of three-dimensional forms in this semi-realist painting is similar to the 3D animation style of Toy Story by Pixar. This scene depicts the heart of an (white) American family experience, which is a set of relationships protected by “mama bear” and the “papa bear,” who are in turn secured by the larger society, in turn empowered by the police and the military industrial complex of the government. Imagine a castle inside a castle inside a castle: in the safest compartment in the deepest parts of the Star Destroyer is the playground for Darth Vader’s children.
When perusing through the works in the exhibition, the idea or the feeling slowly emerges about love, care, and affection amongst human beings. It is often an unequal relationship between the nurtured and the nurturing, and the powerless and the powered, but there is an equalizing force in this human equation, and that is the power of love.
Kaylan Buteyn curated this exhibition, perhaps, out of a necessity to examine the concept of labor of love and its potential for infinite affection and labor. Infinite labor is a concept that is often visible in a religious context, such as the painters of Buddhist art on silk during the Goryeo Dynasty in Korea. The ancient Korean painters devoted long hours that equated to a form of infinite labor, in which they applied every minute detail carefully to their paintings. Infinite labor is only possible if it involves love as an element because in today’s capitalist world labor is calculated to a monetary sum, and capital is a finite resource. While most of the works in the exhibition may not exhibit the qualities of infinite labor in a literal sense, they and the works of the ancient Korean artists both come from the same source (love).
Love generates infinite affection, dedication, and labor. Here we are reminded that love is much, much more powerful than money or any kind of economic or political power. Love provides consensual access to another being’s powers and brings people together, turning competition into its greater form of cooperation. Those Who Tend makes a powerful statement about human nature and our capacity for love.
Artists in the exhibition: Heidi Brueckner, Ana Maria Farina, Hanna Washburn, Barry Beach, Jodi Brown Steifel, Sydney Brown, Shannon Cleere, Christina Cornier, Morgan Ford Willingham, Anya Kotler, Amanda Lechner, Catherine LeComte Lecce, Lucy Bohnsack, Kara Patrowicz, Mary Porterfield, Angela Shaffer, Sarah Sharp, Allyson Smith, Vanessa Torres, Sara Tuttle, Colleen Walsh, and Toni Pepe . Curated by Kaylan Buteyn in partnership with Visionary Art Collective
Warnes Contemporary , 52 2nd Ave, Suite 40, Brooklyn, NY, US
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About the Writer: Chunbum Park, also known as Chun, is a writer, artist, and photographer from South Korea, where they were born in 1991. Park has written for the New Visionary Magazine, Two Coats of Paint, Tussle Magazine, XIBT Magazine, and others. They completed their MFA in Fine Arts Studio from the Rochester Institute of Technology in 2022. Park’s graduate thesis dealt with the merging of gender fluidity, anti-racist aesthetics, and Northeast Asian beauty in their art. They also interview artists at the Emerging Whales Collective.