Pressing Matter is organized around the artists’ intimate relationship
to their materials, a theme embodied best in Judith Braun’s mystic, Native
American like, wall drawing of hand prints. Knowing Braun only from reputation
and as a fixture of Brooklyn openings, I found it nice to see her work in
person. It is quite impressive how intricate the gradation and patterning is. She
manages to elevate finger painting to the point where it looses all primal
associations and /or childhood and becomes a well-executed drawing. In very
much the same way that Antonia Perez’s net / grid of tightly woven plastic
grocery bags are transformed into plastic ropes with amazing shifts in color
gradation. This combined with the highly unlikely coloring of the bags pushes her
piece pass being about materials to highlight say recycling and becomes a
wonderful piece of minimalist color-field work, like a Nineties Rothko. I am
not sure I enjoyed Hilda Shen’s work as much. Her small ceramic pieces
certainly fit the show’s theme as effectively as Braun’s handprint drawings,
but I have a hard time accepting these small ceramic objects as a medium. It is
admittedly out of my own ignorance, and I did just see a group show in Chelsea
with small ceramic objects, so she isn’t alone in this practice nowadays, but I
still look at the pieces and see unfinished art class projects. I know there
are some impressive things going on with the glazes, but with the small scale,
it’s just hard for me to get past my own very amateurish experiences with the medium
to take them as seriously as I should.
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