Super Scientific Biased Triangulation:
Two Three-Person Shows
Data triangulation looks at multiple sets of information or methods to reveal or confirm a conclusion. It’s used by researchers in fields like medicine, tech, and marketing, but I’m thinking about triangulation in the context of three-person shows. We can compare the data (the art) or the method of collection (the process or medium) to arrive at “the point” of the exhibition and solidify our conclusions. Last month, two three-person shows stood out: finite body, infinite field at Good Children and gentle as a breath at Staple Goods.
If a two-person show asks us to consider where two bodies of work overlap, a three-person show introduces a third sample confirming the idea behind the grouping. This idea may be alluded to or stated specifically in the show title or exhibition statement. But sometimes a viewer looking at the same data will draw different conclusions.
finite body, infinite field
Rachel Jones Deris, Ariya Aladjem Wolf, Brooke Cassady
at Good Children
Each artist has work in the main gallery and in the small back gallery. The back gallery functions like bonus content, while the work in the main gallery is presented in service of the theme. That theme of the show is articulated on the gallery website, claiming: “This exhibition celebrates the female form in its various states of power, fragility, temporality, and persistence.” But it doesn’t. At least not for me.
My own triangulation shows me three artists making objects in three distinct modes: painting (Deris), photography (Wolf), and sculpture (Cassady). Each body of work demonstrates a fixation on a form, only one of which registers as female.
Any research approach can reveal bias, and I’ll confess mine here. At one point, after centuries of male artists passing that ogling view on to viewers, there was a need to reclaim and reconceptualize women’s bodies in visual art. It was new and interesting and necessary. These days though, the concept has lost its urgency. I’m tired of “the female form” as a concept. Personally, I feel no need to “celebrate” the fact of having a body that happens to be female. As for fragility, temporality, and persistence, I’d argue this is not sex-specific. It’s universal. My bias notwithstanding, I’d argue that the work in this show intersects somewhere entirely different, and in my view, more interesting.
Deris does paint women’s bodies. These women are “Rubenesque” and slightly distorted with small heads and exaggerated hips. They appear semi-aware of and unperturbed by the viewer. So how is this not about the female form? OK, it is, in a way, but the common denominator among the figurative paintings (there are also a few landscapes) is the fleshiness and the paint. I would be more surprised to find the artist painting model-thin women than corpulent men, which suggests to me it’s more about flesh than female flesh. The subjects seem at ease in their bodies. The artist seems beyond ease moving oily color around the slick surface of Yupo. The women—unlike the landscapes—provide the artist with both a curvy shape to paint, and draw the contours of, with a small brush. Her fixation seems less on subject, but on the pleasure of painting.
Wolf has photographed cyprus roots, appearing in similar black-and-white compositions as ovoid forms flush with the ground. The artist’s fixation struck me as believable. I found myself thinking about the way a child observes the ground with focus and curiosity. The roots are referred to in the titles as “chthonic forms.” The word “chthonic,” from Ancient Greek, is defined as “relating to, dwelling beneath, or inhabiting the underworld.” Before I read the show’s statement about the female form etcetera, these photographs appeared to be about the forgotten act of noticing, and, like Deris’ paintings, an artist’s insistence on repetition. However, under the banner show description, the root forms become labial. In The Big Lebowski, Maude attempts to provoke The Dude, telling him “My art has been commended as being strongly vaginal… the very word makes some men uncomfortable.” The Dude, unfazed, responds, “Oh yeah?” The vagina angle doesn’t make me uncomfortable, but solicits my own indifferent, “Oh yeah?”
Cassady’s installation, Dredging, assembles crab nets, steel, and repurposed cotton pulp. The work recalls Eva Hesse, whose manipulations of monochromatic “non-art” materials also hung in multiples. Again, before I confronted the thesis of the show, I was thinking about what drove the artist to fabricate seven of these mysterious forms. They absolutely did not strike me as having anything to do with the feminine. The rounded, porous shapes seemed sexless and, following the implication of the nets, trapped.
For me, the most interesting convergence is how artists lock in on a variety of forms for reasons they may not even be able to name or explain to us. Ignoring the stated purpose of the show, I found the work itself some of the most engaging I saw this exhibition cycle.
gentle as a breath
Marianne Desmarais, Sarah Kabot, and Liz Sargent
at Staple Goods
The whole of this exhibition is visible from the doorway of the small gallery, and it’s a cool breeze of a show. Marianne Desmarais’ bells hang in a row along the largest wall. A single, untitled work of light green woven palm thread by Liz Sargent resembles a fishing net. Sarah Kabot’s three faint, framed drawings hang on the wall opposite the bells. The bad news first: The exhibition statement says, “This show comes from a simple invitation to reconstitute physical proximity. It assembles… collaborators who have continued to work together, across distances, throughout their professional careers.” To be blunt, I don’t care about that. What I care about (this is the good news) is that this show—the work and juxtaposition—is wonderful. The art speaks for itself and triangulates to reveal something more interesting to viewers than the fact that the artist-friends reunite in the form of an exhibition.
While each artist showed a different number of works, they all felt equally represented and the works did not feel crowded in spite of that small space. In fact, the work seemed to create a sense of spaciousness. For me, the show is about the powerful void between the materiality of the work and the non-physical space around it. A bell without an open soundbow is hardly a bell. Sound and potential sound is a powerful activation of space. A net without gaps is not a net, the view of the wall behind Sargent’s work is essential. The drawings too depend on unfilled space both visually and in their making. Kabot collects newspaper clippings and meticulously draws details on both sides of the translucent Duralar surface. The original images have been magnified to abstraction, opening the space between the Ben-Day dots, rendered in cyan, magenta, yellow, and graphite. The theme of powerful space is carried through the fact that, according to Desmarais who organized the show, Kabot sits with the collected images long after the events they illustrated have become old news.
Did I get it wrong? Maybe. A three-person show is an invitation to consider the intersection between bodies of work. The problem here was not in the work or the curation but in the supplementary text that promotes a less engaging conclusion. These two shows are well worth the time it takes to look at the data for yourself.
gentle as a breath (Staple Goods)
top photo:finite body, infinite field (Good Children)
