Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / Located in rough-and-tumble Newburgh beyond the pale of riverfront commercial development on a piece of land just yards from the Hudson and insouciantly flush with its waterline, Carolina Wheat and Liz Nielsen’s grandly unvarnished Elijah Wheat Showroom has the Bunyanesque vibe of a frontier museum. Then it suavely wrongfoots its patrons with the fearlessly avant-garde attitude of 1970s Soho. Matthew Lusk’s deviously clever sculptures and installations exploit and reinforce both attributes. Mainly hung from the showroom’s soaring vaulted ceiling, they consist of found hardware-store objects anthropomorphically brandished and purposefully affixed to display tables, fronted by harsh, garish lamps.
Sometimes the objects do seem unthreateningly nonchalant, but others are openly predatory. A throw-rug hooding a plastic owl supported by a sawhorse and a standing ashtray, which evokes Rodin’s Balzac, stays inside the boundaries of benign if vaguely creepy whimsicality. But when a green-jacketed android hovers above you with a garden rake or a sentry-like triumvirate of metal fixtures guarding what looks like a Pop Art Grim Reaper threatens to swoop down into your space, the idea of commerce turns in a more decisively benighted direction. Here the artist himself ventriloquizes his worries about the tone and texture of twenty-first century America, perhaps especially the tyranny and amorality of a paradigm of civic and personal life as a series of transactions.
In counterpoint, on the floor, Lusk splays bricks retrieved from the banks of the Hudson, distressed by natural forces. Nearby, freestanding paintings that reference activities like night fishing take center stage, while Minimalist abstractions hug the wall. This array could be read as quiet exaltation of an increasingly shaded and undervalued part of the world, muted by contorted Americana and ersatz greatness. In tenor, Lusk’s surrealism appears situated smack-dab between Dali’s unconstrained extravagance and Giacometti’s deadpan mordancy. That’s about right for this tenuous moment. As conceptual art, while Lusk’s gnawingly discomfiting suspensions are more expressionistic, aggressive, and overtly contrived than, say, Robert Gober’s work, the bricks amid the paintings pack a kindred existential wallop in conveying the way obliviousness sneaks up on us. In this slily penetrating exhibition, what might appear trifling really isn’t.
“Matthew Lusk: Encyclopedia of Lights (Today in Two Parts),” Elijah Wheat Showroom, 19 Front Street, Newburgh, NY. Through December 1, 2024.
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.
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