DAVID GIBSON WRITING

Crush Part 2 , 2015. Clothing, leather, silicone, Plexiglas, wood frame; 70 x 51 x 2 inches Three years ago , on a   cold rainy winter day, I chanced upon a closing party for Donna Huanca, to whom I was quickly introduced. As we exchanged pleasantries I glanced around the gallery, which was hung to the rafters with the various details of her work. There were entire outfits of clothing pressed between panes of glass and framed; vaguely biomorphic masses that resembles torsos as tree stumps or compost cubes; mostly nude models with their bodies painted standing like statues on a balcony above or upon a shelf or pedestal upon the wall, staring blankly over the crowd; clearly Huanca desired to bridge the gap between introspection and spectacle.    Cave Woman , 2015. Makeup on wool; 59 x 37 x 1 ½   inches I recall the space of the Joe Sheftel Gallery. Tall and narrow, it gave the impression of being a marginal space, like a stage with the curtain down,

To have emerged from a past that no longer exists is the legacy, and perhaps the tragedy, of those who live long enough to alter and reconstitute their identity. For Pat Benincasa, the obsolescence of the Industrial Era in American history held not only dreams in its wake, but lives. Her work encompasses the structures, the towns and cities, the greater American landscape around them, and the specific if frequently forgotten accomplishments of figures from this world. She has taken cultural possession of the past. Within its fabric hides a rich palimpsest where memory and the imagination meet. She excavates and celebrates the details that make up this history. Benincasa’s oeuvre encompasses three distinct bodies of work. One is devoted to the industrial structures; the second to the streets and avenues of Rust Belt cities, that were known for specific industrial products, and became communities; and for her newest project, “Women At The Wheel,” a series of history markers commemorating

  The challenge of the painter is to invent a version of the world that adds to our own while also amassing a diverse range of expressions that reflects the accumulated knowledge of a particular experience. This is then injected into the process that allows them to invent anew with each canvas, like an equation or solvent that enables all the other elements to seek the most comprehensive solution possible. For Katherine Parker, the spark that begins the alchemy of her transformative paintings, The Ghost Town series, is a tangent where opposing forces meet, commingle, and give birth to an idiosyncratic vision that is fought and won each time, leaving its marks of passage for all to view. The artist begins with an empty canvas but is already filling it up in her mind before a single brush meets the surface. Certain structures or amounts of painterly matter are in the mind, and must be put down initially even if they are due to be obscured. This is the case in each of Parker’s paintings

The Artist as Nature   In a famous statement by Jackson Pollock, when asked by Hans Hoffman whether he worked from nature (i.e., from drawings or models), he said “I am nature” and then refused to elaborate. When we consider the work of Virginia Katz in its various guises, this statement may also occur to us. It offers a key to the weight of her accomplishments, which have over time expanded into varying dimensions of an artist not only working from nature, but becoming it. The concept behind Land or Environmental Art creates a decisive break with the narrative conditions within art of the past that depended upon the natural world, such as the Impressionists, or that speculatively utilized spaces for esthetic fodder while imposing conditional restrains, as in Conceptual Art. Katz investigates nature’s vastness and multiplicity as an expressive sublime, and her work alternates among the four elements, and between degrees of perception and projection of scale and depth of meaning.   

Art itself is inspired and diverse, it merges and conflates ideas that take the form of creative expression in ways difficult to define. The paintings of Francine Tint are a perfect example of this. At first we may view them as agglomerations of pure pigment, but soon we begin to see portions of her composition stand out from the rest. They take over our concentration. From these elements to the support, our attention teeters back and forth, creating absurdity and doubt.   Titled “Explorations,” her new solo exhibition at The Cavalier Gallery, presents a variety of canvases in which metaphors of motion or growth figure highly. The current paintings of Francine Tint express a variety of truths with a great vigor and deftness of touch. Tint’s paintings take from a broad visual register, and they abound in color and vitality. Nothing here sits idly within its own composition upon the canvas, sleeping in the somnolence of stylistic ease. Hers is the minutiae of a mind on fire, constantly

  Elisa Johns’ current body of work presents us with paintings of ‘pretty flowers’—not effusive bunches ornately arranged, but lonely little boughs almost accidentally discovered, that proclaim their idiosyncrasy. She photographs them while on regular hikes amid the peaks and vales of the Sierra Nevada’s, a 70-mile wide by 400-mile long range of mountains crossing the length of the state of California, a vast landscape reminiscent of the early pioneer era in American history. Despite this dramatic backdrop, lush with historical reference, and bounding with breathless vistas, Johns makes little discoveries that she documents photographically and then works out her compositions from the photographs.   Ghost Flowers 2, 2016, Ink and acrylic on paper, 44 x 40 inches   Johns has a penchant for the uncommon growth, although the chances she may have had to encounter these plants in areas where they are most common may have been aided by a bit of homework and an aptitude for looki