Coherent divergence at John Molloy Gallery

Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / “Mutability,” a thoughtfully conceived and curated group show at John Molloy Gallery, by its title contemplates the elastic aesthetic capacities of painting, drawing, and sculpture. It further explores the compulsion of the three featured artists to segue from one form to another and thus to produce visually rich hybrids. While such formal nicety is interesting in itself, the work here also touches smartly on a range of more worldly concerns.

Carter Hodgkin derives her work, which combines painting and collage, from animation and digital code. It reads alternatively as pixelated images or as occluded content. Contrasting colors sharpen the sense of information withheld and pique curiosity and perhaps frustration. See, in particular, the enigmatic red shape that seems to be seeking repose in Radial Dither 19. These mesmerizing pieces get at increasingly unavoidable digital mediation between viewer and viewed as well as the gap between technically capturable information and the layperson’s control of or access to it, which artists such as Steve DiBenedetto (whose work was recently on view at David Nolan Gallery), Chris Dorland, and Steve Greene have also cogently addressed.

While Hodgkin’s work zones in on the digital thrum, Drew Shiflett’s untitled and essentially monochromatic wall reliefs are firmly, even sternly, analog. They recapitulate vaguely familiar – though not tightly referential – architectural motifs and tableaux by way of elegantly exacting line and considered, intensive reiteration. They are not overtly sentimental or polemic, and don’t forcefully convey a sense of yearning for the constraints of modernism. But her pieces do seem to insist on cognizable structure and to gently resist open-ended creative drift. In sum, they are sane and grounded, as well as handsomely rendered.

Irish-born Helen O’Leary’s uncannily penetrating three-dimensional constructions reach back farther still – sometimes, it seems, well into the twentieth century. They are swaggering in their jerry-built proletarianism, in-your-face shabbiness, and sardonic wit. Problem with adjectives #2, which resembles a ship becalmed by the perverse burdens of fine-tuning, could be poking fun at Joycean prolixity – O’Leary scans as closer to Beckett – or postmodern smugness; take your pick. The term “safe house” has a specific and ominous meaning in Ireland, and the eponymous piece – consisting of two spare wooden cottage frames and an explosively shaped but blandly white cut-out in the foreground – seizes on the uneasy proximity of political violence to everyday life with throat-catching terseness.

Overall, this exhibition is a deftly targeted reminder that while artists diverge widely in their respective vantage points, they share a penchant for visually distilling what strikes them as important and can, if they choose, use a variety of means to do so.

“Mutability,” John Molloy Gallery, 49 E. 78th Street, New York, NY. Through December 16, 2023. 

About the author: Jonathan Stevenson is a New York-based policy analyst, writer, and editor, contributing to the New York Times, the New York Review of Books, and Politico, among other publications. He is a regular contributor to Two Coats of Paint.

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