Photo courtesy of the Hoax Gallery
It was a warm sight from the curb on the east side of Howell Avenue: A glowing storefront interior stuffed with dozens of bundled November bodies snaking around art, rapt in conversation, fluttering in and out of the space like moths around a sodium streetlight. As I parked my vehicle before heading into “Narrative Perspectives” at Hoax Gallery in Bay View, a stack of press materials scattered across my dash for the upcoming “Masterworks of the Phillips Collection” at the Milwaukee Art Museum. Gathering the pages in the yellow light, I imagined the moment as a wonderful collision of local art narratives; bookends of a sprawling art scene, from cracked curbs to colossal Calatravas.
Inside, four artists regaled the space with formal and material vitality to match the social ferment. Curated by artist Jason Yi, the show is a bit dense in the small space, but it’s justifiable—I’d err on the side of inclusion, too, given the effectiveness of the work.
On the left as one enters, a large pedestal features a handsome and strangely biomorphic sculpture by Linda Marcus. “Strangely” because, while it smacks first as a something biological (maybe fungal) and possibly still growing, it is, in fact, made of cast iron. Turns out the solid metal creature began as a personal, delicate and very handmade object. Marcus methodically wound yarn around twisted garments of personal significance, concealing the preciousness of the subject matter literally and figuratively through iterative processes. It bears the contradictory tension of a prehistoric bug frozen in amber or a bronzed children’s shoe; somehow distant, prophylactic, universal and hyper-individual all at once.
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Nykoli Koslow’s paintings echo Marcus’ twisting, semi-biological forms with a completely different material and mark-making repertoire. His hyperchromatic panels piled with luscious, fluid brushstrokes emerge into otherworldly landscapes. Each small, richly colored painting is a totally thrilling and immersive visual experience, though somewhat swallowed up by the sheer number of small individual works in close proximity. Together, the paintings produce a kind of field effect, where the whole overpowers its individual components like a uniform forest of wonderfully uniform trees. It’s ultimately a champagne problem, given most artists would be happy to arrive at such trees in the first place.
Photo courtesy of the Hoax Gallery
Riley Niemack’s contributions to the show are especially diverse, from 2-D wall pieces, to a video of a performance, to an exquisitely and deceptively prosaic twisting, sculptural lump called Blend Mend Trend (Interrelationships). The husky body of gray, air-dried clay and wooden blocks on a clean, white pedestal could be the lovechild of Koslow’s and Marcus’ work. It has his body and her eyes. The sculpture’s wrenched forms and naked materiality are simultaneously pure and dirty, substantial and subjective. And in its hybridity, it channels—or inherits, maybe—the narrative surge of the show with purpose and informal panache.
In the context of the show, Sonal Jain’s busy network of oil stick marks on paper in Untitled reminded me of Thomas B. Hess’ acclaimed 1950 Artnews piece, “De Kooning Paints a Picture.” Hess describes the artist laboring to paint his now famous Woman: “Like any myth, its emergence was long, difficult and (to use one of the artist’s favorite adjectives) mysterious.” Jain’s work, too, feels like an inventory or residue of thought, negation, erasure, reactivation and constant engagement. The form in her work seems inextricably connected to the physical and temporal, like things collected on a mysterious journey.
“Narrative Perspectives” is a somewhat blunt title for a very pointed show displaying considerable curatorial focus. Then again, Yi’s concerns about the confluence of time, process, material into fluid, artistic narratives is so purposefully stated through the work that a sharper title might give too much away. So maybe his titular casualness is appropriate—casual exteriors and substantial interiors were, after all, a kind of a general theme for the evening: for the art, the venue and for all those who came out to admire it all on a cold November evening.
