Among abstraction's progeny, pattern painting and op art are sometimes uneasy offspring. The latter arose in the 1960s and shares its cousin pop art's impishness, but is interested mostly in the illusions that patterns and colors create. Hitting its stride in the '70s, pattern painting asserted the simple pleasures of visual exuberance against the intellectual rigors of minimalism. It did so with the implication that patterns were the overlooked province of "women's work."
The work in Less Is More at Dust Gallery, on display through April 10, reconciles the siblings. With rigid lines and nebulous swaths, Jennifer Riley achieves a creamy, radiant depth in her paintings, almost as if she were depicting a narrow focal distance against a background of regressing blur. This is especially true in paintings such as "Biological Flutters" and "Borrowed Kisses," with their foreground architecture of thin, oblique vectors echoed in bright, vague bands. Outlining the slender bands in yellow plays tricks with color perception while suggesting vibrant motion.
But her paintings also play with the pleasures of pattern. "Vita Activa," in particular, has the deceptively simple air of striped kitchen linen.
Riley is smartly paired with Marietta Hoferer, likewise a New Yorker but German-born and educated. Her elegant drawings comprise pencil lines and sometimes tiny strips of different types of clear tape on paper. They process minimalist rigor through the prism of op art, and the results are literally prismatic. The strips of tape refract light in ways that cause shifts of tone and value depending on the angle of viewing.
This play can vary within a composition. The triptych "L-M-R," for instance, has strapping tape whose embedded lines counterpoint the blocks of clear tape with a frosted texture.
Riley's work also has its pattern-pleasure aspect. The individual sheets (they are unframed, and hang from clips) of "Small Crystal" embrace a similar arrangement of interlocking, stair-step circles, reminiscent of quilts. The square panels of "J Piece" each comprise a kind of snowflake pattern of interlocking circles, also quilt-like. But the grid arrangement of these loose paper "tiles" makes for an engaging visual experience all too itself.
This shrewd pairing makes for a rewarding show.
The annual Juried Show at Contemporary Arts Collective, on display through April 9, is all over the genre map, as you might expect. Usually a juried show is an invitation to identify common threads that betray interests of the juror. But in this case, juror Edmund Cardoni, executive director of Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center in Buffalo, New York, left no discernible threads, loose or otherwise.
The show is sensibly and tastefully arranged, landscapes with landscapes, flowers with flowers, and on the whole has the feel of familiarity for anyone who follows the local art scene—in some cases too familiar. But from this indistinct background emerge several interesting, idiosyncratic entries.
John Banks' steel sculpture, "Figure Five in Gold," is a pole holding aloft the numeral, which is distorted in three dimensions so it's only recognizable from one angle. "Lemon Hat," by Jesse Smigel, is a furry frame with '60s color bubbles on the matting around an oddly angled picture of a cat with the title object strapped to its blunt head. Karen Zefting Alcorn scrupulously renders the title objects of the diptych, "Tied Antler" and "Tied 357," down to the dots of the aggregate background, raising the question of why anyone would tie an antler or a pistol to a stone slab.
Cirque du Soleil stretches its tentacles into the visual art world with a show opening in the Arts Factory for First Friday this week. The Collective comprises works by cast and crew of various Cirque productions, and results from a program that encourages creativity among Cirque employees.