NINA CHANEL ABNEY at The School and OTHER REALITIES (Exploring Proximate Mysticisms), at Bill Arning Exhibitions.
NINA CHANEL ABNEY: LIE DOGGO at Jack Shainmans’s The School, Kinderhook, N.Y., through October 5, ‘24.
Artwork © Nina Chanel Abney. Image courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York. Photo: Dan Bradica Studio.
Vigorous compositions of ultra-vibrant color, super-graphic hardedge shapes, schematic, cartoonish figures, and large doses of humor, lend works by Nina Chanel Abney an enormous popular appeal. This ambitious survey of mostly recent works, LIE DOGGO, fills all spaces of The School and features large-scale paintings, sculptures, collages, site-specific murals, and an in-depth look at her CryptoPunks digital works. The exhibition is sure to attract an even larger audience for her work. Should art be this entertaining? Within the punchy crowd-pleasing visual choreography that she has refined over the years, however, there is a consistent current of socio-political themes. Problems of racial and sexual identity and inequality, are evident as are feminist issues, the dynamics of political power, and a host of other real-life concerns. Even in a series of light-hearted, oval-shaped painted portraits, there is a sense of humanism and empathy that is thoughtfully presented, imaginatively expressed, and obviously deeply felt.
Artwork © Nina Chanel Abney. Image courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York. Photo: Dan Bradica Studio.
Among the many striking works in LIE DOGGO (whose title refers to a strategic invisibility, and biding one’s time), the painted brass wall relief, Gated Community (2024) deals with the sobering reality of social exclusivity by means of an arrangement of highly stylized Black figures and white-faced characters cordoned off from each other by a repeated sequence of metal strips or bars. Marabou (2024), showing a series of abstracted female figures giving birth, addresses the hot-button theme of women’s reproductive rights currently under siege throughout many parts of the U.S. In formal terms, Abney references Matisse, Picasso, and Jacob Lawrence; her jazzy quasi-abstract compositions sometimes also recall for me Stuart Davis’s paintings. A new group of free-standing painted aluminum sculptures, such as The Qing, correspond to certain Keith Haring works in mood and message. In this exhibition, however, Abney succeeds in making a unique and resonant visual statement. — David Ebony
OTHER REALITIES (Exploring Proximate Mysticisms), at Bill Arning Exhibitions, Kinderhook, N.Y., through June 23, ‘24.
Other Realities at Bill Arning Exhibitions; Installation View. Works by Frederick Gladling Kahl, Elizabeth Insogna, Lionel Cruet, and Paula Hayes. Photo by Spencer House Studios, Austerlitz, NY.
The kind of personalized nature mysticism that Walt Whitman proffers and explores in his 1882 book Specimen Days came to mind while viewing Other Realities (Exploring Proximate Mysticisms) at Bill Arning Exhibitions. In the chapter titled A Sun-bath / Nakedness, Whitman writes, “As I walked slowly over the grass, the sun shone out enough to show the shadow moving with me. Somehow I seemed to get identity with each and every thing around me, in its condition. Nature was naked, and I was also. . . Perhaps the inner, never-lost rapport we hold with earth, light, trees, etc., is not to be realized through eyes and mind only, but through the whole corporeal body.” A similar communion with nature and the corporeal body is expressed in each of the works in Other Realities, a compact and concisely organized group show with a coherent mystical theme.
Justin Vivian Bond, Lois, 2024, from the Witch Eyes series, watercolor and pencil on paper, 4 x 4 in; Photo courtesy Bill Arning Exhibitions.
Works by artists Paula Hayes, Frederick Gladding Kahl, and Jesse Bradford reflect a ritualistic approach to painting and drawing, with obsessively repetitive abstract shapes of the imagination, or forms derived directly from natural specimens, resulting in intense and mediative works. Justin Vivian Bond has been mediating on the performers, mostly female, who have inspired many in the LGBTQ+ community, by rendering a single eye of an individual that they have found particularly motivating, such as Lois (2024), a superlative example on view here. Elizabeth Insogna, with her elaborate glazed ceramic sculptures incorporating ancient script, and Lionel Cruet, with his series of photo works detailing a personal, natural ritual, tap into primordial states of consciousness and the fundamental act of creation. Cruet, with his Sun Simulacrum Series (2023) of nude self-portraits holding a mirror disk above his head, suggests a direct link with the form of nature worship that Walt Whitman had in mind. — David Ebony