shed a little

TRUDY BENSON / RUSSELL TYLER

East Hampton Shed

Trudy Benson, Yellow Shade, 2015, oil and acrylic on canvas

Tucked away among a forested stretch off Buckskill Road, East Hampton Shed is changing the way we think about the barns and outbuildings dotting the back forty of homes on the East End. Four years ago, Hadley Vogel and Nate Hitchcock transformed a modest structure behind the Vogel Bindery into a space so crisp and white it's suitable for framing.

East Hampton Shed, behind the Vogel Bindery in East Hampton

More than a lean-to, less than a guest house, the Shed has morphed into a micro-gallery exhibiting some of the most interesting young artists between here and Mexico City. Exhibitions have included Lauren Luloff, Landon Metz, Brian Kokoska, Rebecca Ward, Abigail Vogel and Jean-Baptiste Bernadet, among others. Two Brooklyn-based painters, Trudy Benson and Russell Tyler open the season this year.

Russell Tyler, BBPG, 2014, oil on canvas

The evolution of the Shed goes back a way. While studying at Chicago's Columbia College, Vogel began to adapt a curatorial platform. Drawing on Chicago's do-it-yourself aesthetic, she mounted an apartment gallery, maintaining it for three years. "It was a labor of love," she said, noting that the gallery came long before her knowledge of the art market.

Hitchcock and Vogel eventually teamed up, and their shared affinity for contemporary art led them to Mexico City, drawn there in part by Gerardo Contreras's groundbreaking Preteen Gallery. Since then they've mounted off-site events and exhibitions and participated in art fairs in Miami, New York and Mexico. Hitchcock, also an independent curator, has organized shows at galleries such as Johannes Vogt in New York and LA's Honor Fraser. 

detail, Benson's Yellow Shade, 2015

Back at the Shed, single works by both artists activate this dynamic space. Benson's work is a layered melange of calligraphy, cutaways and viscous swaths of pigment, with strata of gestures pushing forward and sliding back at the same time. Fast paced and blithely haywire, Yellow Shade is a meditation on destabilization. 


While the pictorial field is filled with spatial ruptures, formally the painting thrives on compositional rejoinders like background, foreground and middle ground -- its cacophony yielding to formal balance. 

Benson's strategy is frisky, skillful and tight. She lays down a ground of sprightly lines, creating a hazy playground of airbrushed doodles that pop in an out of focus. 

Mid-ground, abstract shapes function like architectural gateways that both anchor the image field and act as a window into the painting. 

In the foreground, contours of extruded pigment fly over the surface, marking the field like Nazca lines. The effect is radiant and dizzying.

   

Trudy Benson 

Russell Tyler and friend

   

On an adjacent wall, Russell Tyler's painting BBPG is ravenous, imbued with an explosive painterly finesse. In his rigorous studio practice Tyler has moved nimbly from the figurative to geometric abstraction, continuing outward from there, always with a long interpretive glance.

Known for paintings that possess a raw structural precision and evocations of obsolete technology, vintage computer graphics and video games, his abstractions convey a deep sense of nostalgia. 

Russell Tyler, BBPG, 2015, acrylic and oil on canvas

Tyler's appreciation of mid-century American abstraction is also nostalgic, and it taps into Reinhardt, Hoffman and Still with a distance that is reductive, refreshing and free of post-modern angst. In figural works he has referenced Goya, and here, BBPG is a tour de force homage to Phillip Guston, abstract expressionism and the New York school. 

His material sensibility is one of such viscidity and so much depth that the paintings veer toward the sculptural, possessing a powerful physical presence.

With a palette that's more Dow Chemical than, say, Per Kirkeby's naturalist, feel-good coloration, Tyler's synthetic colors source the likes of TV screens, patio furniture or plastic refuse. Not unlike Guston, his exploration of color gradients is often limited in tone and hue. 

In BBPG, Pepto-Bismol pinks rub shoulders with blacks and a range of baby blues, cobalt and Payne's gray. The effect is stunning, with blues and grays commingling dead center in a collision of slurpy clouds, painterly schisms and muscular, effusive marks. Tyler is a painter's painter.

Watch for the next iteration at the East Hampton Shed -- it's sure to be memorable.

cool tectonics on chrystie street

Tectonic Drift

Brian Morris Gallery

                                 

Amanda Church, Engagement, 2012, oil on canvas, 30 x 24"

Tectonic Drift at Brian Morris Gallery offered up a slice of perfection this winter, commingling painterly ferociousness with optic precision in varied works by Amanda Church, Brian Cypher, Stacy Fisher, Gary Petersen and Russell Tyler.

Odds n' Ends (5), 2012

Stacy Fisher's sculpture, Odds n' Ends (5), appears in the window like a mushroom cloud, setting the stage for this bright amalgam of works that become visible as you descend into the gallery, situated just below street level on Chrystie Street. 

 

Fisher's studio practice is of the take-no-prisoners variety and it yields a melange of incongruent form, spatial/architectural hiccups and things that make you feel as if they carry memory inside them. Her imagery -- rectangles, wood anatomies and hulking, globular shapes -- possesses a lingering anima that feels partly human.    

  

Stacy Fisher, Orange Striped Wall Sculpture, 2010

                                                       

Fisher has commented about generating her work from key phrases like "irregular squares" or "bunches." Like concrete poetry, her use of salvaged house paint (and otherwise ordinary materials) allows her to employ a "found" palette and this, alongside the samplings of wordplay that are framed in the service of creating her work is provocative, and it lends a mystique to pieces that play in the margins between flatness and depth, painting and sculpture, and the anthropomorphic and its opposite, whatever that might be.

Brian Cypher, Deep Divide, 2013, oil on canvas

In a similar way, Brian Cypher flirts with the recognizable in paintings that transform thought and process into imagery. The resulting canvases appear to be in a constant state of reinvention -- as if they will continue to morph in concept and form while they're on view. Cypher's paintings are a topology of furrows and fissures, filled with visual references and abstract form that defy categorization. 

 

The imagery in Deep Divide conjures inflated lungs or yin/yang, and of burrowing in like a feral cat might -- as if meaning was buried deep inside the canvas. The process of discovery is palpable in these refreshing works.

Amanda Church, L: Blondie, 2012; R: Resistance, 2012, both oil on canvas

Eros and artifice meet in works by Amanda Church, whose blithely sexual paintings celebrate the flesh amid dreamy landscapes, sinuous, meandering lines, and fictive pink and lemon yellow figures. 

Church employs frank sexuality as if she's descended from Francis Bacon -- sans his brutality, darkness and downright scariness -- placing the figure in and out of dimensional expanses where it hovers between flatness and deep space. Her elastic forms and use of torqued perspective glide the viewer into a netherworld of candy colored sensuousness. 

In Engagement (at the top), cranberry contours swirl around plushy orbs like so many silk scarves. Church's brushwork is tactile and it lends a toothiness to the sexual metaphor with soft striations of paint and the velvety, pigment-rich surfaces she creates. 

Gary Petersen, Point the Way, 2012, acrylic and ink on masonite

Gary Petersen, Ray Waves, 2013, acrylic and oil on masonite

Gary Petersen's use of line is intuitive, ricocheting from corner to corner to corner like the trajectory of a billiard ball. As his linear motif accumulates across the surface, it crisscrosses at various junctures and -- almost accidentally -- frames out spacial forms (mostly trapezoids and wedges) that anchor the imagery within the perimeters defined by kinetic pathways.

Gary Petersen, Somewhere in Between, 2013, acrylic and oil on wood

Petersen animates the picture field with lines that vary from dense color bars to labyrinthian architectures that fracture, push and weave through the composition. His palette is plastic and prismatic, invoking contradiction, playfulness, and a space-bending joie d'vivre that is full of life.

Russell Tyler, TV, 2012, oil on canvas

Russell Tyler scavenges technological debris such as television test patterns and early computer graphics, commuting it into subject matter. In his paintings, structure and process lay cheek by jowl, slathered on to canvas with a smart and precise sense of total abandon.

Russell Tyler, Computing II, 2013, oil on canvas

For Tyler, whose imagery ranges from lateral bars of thick gradient color to frenzied game boards and reconfigured Nintendo backgrounds, the painting process is something of a throwdown between himself and the canvas. The results are exhilarating, carrying within an overwhelming sense of immediacy, freshness and a not so subtle commentary on the sort of dystopian universe that defines much of modern living.

For the writer, poet, martial artist and occasional healer Brian Morris, the gallery business is clearly one that reflects a broad range of contemporary and contemplative thought. This is definitely a gallery to keep your eyes on.

Stacy Fisher

Brian Morris Gallery
163 Chrystie Street
New York City, 10002

brianmorrisgallery.com