A very well-curated body of work about books and
storytelling that feels like you’ve just walked into a very stylish study. Karl
LaRocca shows meticulously drawn copies of receipts with an obsessive care that
seems to scream that the objects hold a personal significance. Aaron Krach has
books staked to human height, volumes that have been checked out of the New
York Public Library and had their cover pages stamped to alert the reader that
the book’s author committed suicide. The books reportedly are going back to the
library with, I would assume, considerable late fees. That will hopefully
reenter circulation with nice little pieces of jarring vandalism that might permanently
recontextualize a reader’s experience of the book, very much like finding a penis
drawn onto and into figures in art books from the library. The center of the
room features Martin McMurry’s wood sculpture books with hand-painted dust
jackets where the back covers portraits portray the authors as being anyone
from Anwar Sadat to Steve Zissou.
The show’s opposite wall seems to get a little more open and
trippy with the theme, where Tom Marquet’s text drawings of the phrase “it is
what it is” and “is it what is it” not only takes on lazy and truly dim
phrasing, turning it into op art for those of us with dyslexia. I find my brain
has a hard time not reading them all as “it is what it is” and only when I pick
up the actual text “is it what is it” without punctuation the phrase becomes a
somewhat coherent mess of meaning and intent. The pieces are well paired with
Siobhan McBride’s small, dark, disjointed landscapes where a teepee appears to
be exploding in lava while hovering in the subconscious of a wooden road. A very
nice compact show that is downright humble in its straightforwardness and elegant
in its execution.
Through Aug 11th
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