Bates motel: Exhibit in Albany offers inviting introduction to sly work of artist Sharon Bates.
“Exhibit B” serves as fine introduction to sly art of Sharon Bates
There is something wonderfully difficult about the easy looking artwork of Sharon Bates. We see things we already know — black and white targets (dissected), bird cages (painted), furniture (fragments), and rugs (on the wall). But it gets complicated under the surfaces. If there is nothing a bit wrong about the work, there is (deliberately) something still not right about it.
And that is the roiling thrill of these assembled pieces of ordinary life, made new and sculptural and emphatic. The work at the big, bright Opalka gallery is smartly installed in a show called, with sly ambiguity, “Exhibit B.” Another bit of evidence. A rethinking and reconstruction of found objects, assembled and combined in ways we don’t expect but that make sense.
Curator Judie Gilmore honors the force that Bates brings to the gallery in the best way: “It is a stretch to say I curated this show. No one curates Sharon Bates, the curator. Sharon Bates, the artist, came fully curated.” The assemblage sculptures, the drawings and paintings, and the displays of found objects all intrinsically connect into a single, large statement.
Underlying everything is a clear sense of form — things have proportion and balance, they make visual sense. This great care helps make each piece convincing, and it also makes it easy to like. Right away. Take the series of stacked (or hanging) wire racks and cages against the far wall. A series of six of these airy, vertical constructions, rising some 20 feet high, is each painted a distinct, uniform color. They contain nothing, but create undulating, illogical transitions from top to bottom.
This group defines readymade assemblage by realigning and redefining found objects from our familiar universe. This happens in a simpler way in the large displays of similar (and also found) wooden objects as you enter, like the gorgeous (and often antique) measuring sticks all bent into perfect right angles in a rising display on one wall. There is dada and surrealism underneath all this, with a pop accessibility, too.
At the risk of sounding foolish, I seemed to find a few inside jokes. One work that is a kind of bas relief of four pipes (for smoking tobacco) made me think of Magritte. The title is “Pipeless,” as if a wink referring to that artist’s treacherous painting of a pipe titled, in French, “This is not a pipe.” Likewise the ball squeezed by an unfolded metal clothes dryer made me think of Jasper Johns, who squeezed two balls between a pair of paintings as a pointed joke.
Anyone who knows Sharon Bates knows she’s fun and funny, and this is embedded in all her art. The joy is everywhere. It is maybe least apparent, though, in a few recent large drawings that further prove, for anyone doubting, that this is a gifted, multifaceted artist at work. In a drawing like “Slink,” the acrylic and black ink on paper form resembles something strange from the garden, a bit ominous but exquisitely beautiful, too. And next to this, “Ripe” in its angled football shape is unavoidably sensual, rich in a brooding silence.
Nearby, positively cheerful, a set
of vintage flashcards have been painted over in gouache, presenting witty takes on archetypal objects: a cake (with a slice missing), a foot (stepping on grass), a saucepan (on a roaring campfire), a bed (made perfectly prim). Even with 12, I wish there were more. Likewise I want more than the three stunning works standing like bizarre coat racks on digitally printed designerly backdrops (as if in a photo shoot).
My many parentheses are meant to show that implications are everywhere. Things are not what they first appear. It isn’t just playing with fun stuff, but also giving that “stuff” double meaning, creating presence.
Michael Oatman, in his appreciative (and really well written) essay for the show, observes that “we get it all: love, beauty, doubt, comedy, generosity, ambition, gags; the wacky, beguiling, and luxurious oeuvre of the artist herself.”
We’re looking forward to Exhibit A.