Contributed by Liz Scheer / “Shoot for the Stars,” on view at Swanson Kuball in Long Island City, surveys intergenerational works by members of the Abelow-Kirilloff family, which includes New York artists Joshua Abelow and Tisch Abelow. By presenting the work of siblings, spouses, grandparents, and children, gallery directors Laura Swanson and Greg Kuball raise fascinating questions about the relationship between family and art. Do the formal parameters of a family foster or impede an individual’s creativity? Is a family itself a means of artistic production?
Like a camera, a family imposes a way of seeing onto the world, creating a framework for reality within which a child imaginatively roams. The exhibition seems to ask whether family boundaries are ultimately enabling or stymieing. Though certain works display light-heartedness, much of the exhibition casts the family unit as a limitation. In Vampire Boy, a gouache portrait on paper, Katya Kirilloff depicts her son with fangs. Loose, visible brushwork and unfinished composition gives the piece the quality of a nineteenth-century hobby sketch. It could be read as a cheeky complaint about the vampiric quality of children, who can extract a mother’s energy and suppress her art-making. In another outstanding work, Kirilloff renders her tired face on a paper bag, nodding sardonically to a wife and mother’s endless cycle of shopping and cooking.
Also imparting a sense of menace and constriction is Nuclear Family, Tisch Abelow’s portrait of herself, her brother Joshua, and their parents. Bug-eyed and stiff, the subjects fuse at the work’s center as if to form a single cell. The abundant space around them is a flat, corporate gray, and it is unclear whether they are lodged in something immovable and rock-like or floating in a void. There is something sinister about this duality of vacuity and entrapment.
As a visualization of a family system, “Shoot for the Stars” establishes an interesting tension between family as a method and family as an end. As a method, a family is a vessel that either catalyzes or hobbles a member’s efforts to forge an independent vision. As an end, a family would seem to be less a means of art-making than a choreography of genetic and affective entanglements; it might even qualify as a work of art in its own right. Inquiries about family and art are well suited to Swanson Kuball, which also serves as the couple’s living space. The gallery, like the exhibition, wields domesticity (bed, sofa, cat) as content, shaping viewers’ experiences in a space that suggests familiarity while eluding it.
“Shoot for the Stars,” with Joshua Abelow, Paula Brunner Abelow, Tisch Abelow, Katya Kirilloff, and Lev Lazarus. Swanson Kuball, Long Island City, NY. Through June 15, 2024.
About the author: Liz Scheer is a painter and writer living in New York. Follow her on Instagram at @liz__scheer
