Cynthia Talmadge Franklin Fifth Helena
56 Henry, New York 17 November – 16 January
Melancholic creators the world over have found solace in the analyst’s couch since Freud beseeched us to search our interior worlds. Obsessively and meticulously built from sand, Cynthia Talmadge’s exhibition functions as the claustrophobic reservoir of a mind. It’s also a hodgepodge of the high and low: a contemporary studiolo (the Renaissance elite’s room for study and contemplation) pieced together through dyed sand grains, a throwback to those do-it-yourself craft kits, but also rich artistic practices across the globe, from Aborginal representations of dreamtime to Japanese bonseki.
Viewers enter a panelled space about the size of an Upper East Sider’s walk-in closet, or panic room. Each panel is a trompe l’oeil sand-painting depicting a series of trellis arcades, shelves and mirrors; and, collectively, a midden of notes, artist supplies, books on psychiatry and a dartboard. Amid all that there’s also a ‘taped’ picture of a midcentury chaise longue autographed with Marilyn Monroe’s signature. Depending on how deep viewers wish to venture into the intertwined histories of psychoanalysis and pop culture, there’s a plethora of references to Ralph Greenson, Monroe’s analyst, and the patient–therapist boundaries they blurred (the title is an amalgam of their respective addresses during that time). Like a serotonin dip after the party, Talmadge’s ceiling panels crown the gallery with deflated beach balls and balloons, a few lonely paper streamers. The most salient moments of Franklin Fifth Helena reveal themselves through careful visual hunting: the sandy panels also act as mirrors, reflecting the opposite panels, revealing the inverse of things, leading to an endless search for discrepancies that never materialise. These windows, and their mysterious ephemera and clues, further obfuscate a tidy story, and confound the distinctions between Monroe, Greenson and the artist.
The installation channels, and matches, the granular obsessiveness of Liza Lou’s Kitchen (1991–96), the domestic space bedecked with beads, but also the work of Pattern and Decoration artists like Miriam Schapiro, whose glittered femmages elevated the sewn, stitched and floral as a fuck you to Clement Greenberg. Talmadge’s work does not jettison painterly conceits entirely. The clever deployment of Renaissance linear perspective bewitches, and encourages viewers to wonder: to whom does this studiolo belong? Here we have access to an imagined mind – perhaps infused with drops of the artist’s own, perhaps not. An individual fashioned by a good modern education lived here. The space is a wellspring for the intelligentsia, yes, but it is buoyed by the interior world’s mess. Owen Du y