Every few years, the death of painting is proclaimed, and every few years, the medium finds itself miraculously resuscitated. I'm not sure which part of the cycle we're in, but the evidence from New York, at least that offered by NY
LV at Dust Gallery, is that the noble medium thrives, thank you.
The best work in this survey, put together by painter Lisa Stefanelli, exults in the physics of paint and the tactility of surface. A sense of "What happens if ... ?" guides works by Kathleen Kucka and Peter Fox, both of whom set parameters and submit paint to gravity. In Kucka's case, veils of creamy white acrylic depend from loopy lines that together comprise a mirrored oscillation pattern in "Spontaneous Eventfulness," or a kind of volume-shaping afterimage in "Double Blue."
Fox's two-panel "Garden of ..." is at once crisp, disciplined and chance-driven, a frozen cascade of color. The drying paint defeats time and gravity in this sample of what Fox calls his "abstract drip paintings." It is matched with a "word painting": massive yellow letters on black proclaiming "Jokes On You Jack," marking an entirely different, conceptual frontier of painting.
Sarah Trigg prospects this territory from above, in paintings that reflect aerial descriptions of geographic features. Her "North Baghdad," "Baghdad Overview" and "Saddam's International Airport" depict in pale matte tones mapped sections of that city, but with stylized billows of black smoke that run onto the wall among the panels, as if to suggest that no map can contain what's happened here.
Trigg's paintings are wordless, but nonetheless polemical and hint at a graphic strategy that is, in a sense, illustrational. Whichever art-history cans these painters kick down the road, they frequently reflect influence from pop sources, whether it's news-graphics maps or the comics. Or natural-history textbooks, in the case of Shawn Spencer's "Romance of Finitude," which presents two vaguely caricatural but carefully realized birds in a blasted landscape under a yellow-orange sky. One appears to peck the other, either grooming or attacking.
The show's few detours from paint are unremarkable. "Dust Bustier" is the fabric rigging over the gallery's storefront—a clever-enough Vegas-y note. In Elizabeth Gray's video, "Cliff Walk Starring Molly Smith," the camera, often shooting toward the sun, literally follows the footsteps of a woman in ridiculously inappropriate high heels as she clambers over seaside rocks. I won't spoil the suspense, but I found myself more concerned for the cinematographer's footing. I suppose that's a kind of irony, too.
Curator Stefanelli had a painting in last spring's Paint Draw at Dust, an exuberant formation of bright red swirls and loops. You can find others on the website of her New York dealer, Elizabeth Heskin Contemporary Art (www.heskinart.com), who represents artists in this show, as well as some associated with Dust. Stefanelli's work, and some in her show, amount to a species of abstract illusionism in which the painter has depicted a form in space as if rendering a design for an abstraction. This might be the seam that binds the most talented artists in both cities, and evidence that painting is doing just fine, thank you.