Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / There are a fair few viable organizing concepts for group art exhibitions. One particularly challenging one is to present viewers with a tour d’horizon of emotions and attitudes that seem to prevail at a given historical moment. The key to optimal execution, of course, is to avoid both the obvious and the obscure. In “Each Own” at Springs Projects, curators and gallery co-founders Cate Holt and Tommy White strike the right balance, strategically deploying the work of six exceptional and subtly kindred artists in the space’s abundant center room and the two more intimate nooks flanking it.
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Bracing entering viewers are three works by Angela Dufresne, a masterful figurative painter. In Tatiana with her very own ejaculate slug, a naked, vaguely angelic woman against a background of sunny but angry weather casually tousles her crotch, unaware that a predator is stalking her. On the opposite wall, the even more discursively titled Werner Schroeter and Elfriede Jelinek demonstrate the act of creation off set of Malina depicts a man hugged by a female companion – these would be the two lefty dramatists who collaborated on the frenetic film of vitality and despair – projecting a robust stream from his penis in a dusky glen. Dufresne’s color choices and nuanced brushwork impart nonchalance and sheepishness, respectively, the smaller portrait of a sardonic female from the past suggesting that this may be the best we can expect in a miasma of moral backsliding. Nearby, Dasha Shishkin’s naughtily surreal, R. Crumb-ish monotypes cuing domesticity, excretion, and pets – for instance, Peeing Onto a Cat – could connote percolating frustration or absurdist resignation. The same goes for Jeannie Weissglass’s abstractly kinetic drawings, distressing à la Ionesco or Ralph Steadman, crowned by her unnerving diptych Off Piste, which projects a jangled urge for dramatic escape. The wise-ass component in the work of all three artists is as serious as it is playful.
Deep into the gallery, extruding from the lefthand nook, Eve of Destruction #1 by Israeli painter Avner Ben-Gal, who passed away suddenly last May, vaults the proceedings into an international arena as disturbing as the domestic one. It presents what looks like a bunker under siege, eyed from an oblique angle, the structure indeterminately poised between destruction and persistence, like much of the Middle East itself. That’s an eloquent visual calibration, not to mention an adroit narrative chapeau that renders his little drawing Buddies wistful and its partner Hatchlings foreboding. On floors and tables, fronting the paintings and drawings, Ryan Johnson’s sleekly abstracted sculptures of tetched flora and fauna and denatured toothbrushes and Ann Agee’s aloofly maternal, elegantly feminist ceramic pieces – one pricelessly titled Amber Pantsuit Madonna – affirm other political currents in contemporary art. But these artists do not indulge in pandering or didacticism. Against such a rich and varied backdrop, the show’s cagily elliptical title celebrates not only the refuge that individual expression can provide but also the multifaceted solidarity that a good art crowd can produce, as it does here.
“Each Own,” Springs Projects, 20 Jay Street, Suite 311B, Brooklyn, NY. Through January 25, 2025. Artists: Ann Agee, Avner Ben-Gal, Angela Dufresne, Ryan Johnson, Dasha Shishkin, and Jeannie Weissglass.
About the author: Jonathan Stevenson is a New York-based policy analyst, editor, and writer, contributing to the New York Times, the New York Review of Books, and Politico, among other publications, and a regular contributor to Two Coats of Paint.
