Tag: Elizabeth Johnson

Solo Shows

Donna Moylan’s egalitarian eclecticism

Contributed by Elizabeth Johnson / “Recent Paintings,” Donna Moylan’s first exhibition at Bookstein Projects, collects works finished over the last year in her Kinderhook studio. In our email conversation, Moylan said that “sometimes paintings take years, as if they had to go off and think.” In addition to making paintings that carry time in the process of their production, she forgoes committing to a serial style, allowing her paintings to differ drastically from one to the next. “When I started doing that, in the nineteen-eighties,” she wrote, “I understood that what I wanted was to equalize, or make equivalent, many different styles of painting, and to refer to different cultures or eras with specificity but without differentiation or emphasis, without focusing on ‘styles.’” She has achieved this goal with considerable aplomb.

Gallery shows

Black and blacker at Studio 10

Contributed by Elizabeth Johnson / Planned with hope and trepidation, “In the Dark,” now up at Studio 10, leans into post-election malaise and dread with work by Mike Ballou, Tom Butter, Larry Greenberg, David Henderson, and Kate Teale – Brooklyn-based artists whose studio explorations are unified through the color black, via shape, mood, and phenomenon. Designed as a positive project for unsettled times, the exhibit coheres as a short list of nascent strategies for coping with darkness writ large before it has been parsed, studied, and conclusively judged. The works share a resistant sense of seduction, anticipation, and opportunity. By virtue of piecemeal construction, the show sustains an alluring in-between emotion, just right for entering voids that are only partly plumbed or viewing objects that are but partly known.