Plants and vases warm galleries
No telling if the fresh snow blanketing the city as I finish this review will still be around by the time it’s published. Regardless, the plants underneath won’t be back for half a year or more. And yet, the galleries of West Town are in full bloom.
That’s true metaphorically of the burgeoning gallery district, which still feels newish and seems to welcome a freshly decamped tenant or two each season, most recently Monique Meloche on North Paulina and a few months prior, veteran dealer Rhona Hoffman on Chicago Avenue.
But it’s also literally true. Nearly every show I saw in West Town a few weeks ago was lush with bursting pale pink peonies, deep indigo hyacinths and spidery plant shoots. I don’t for a minute believe that any of the involved artists or their gallerists had some sort of last-gasp-of-summer notion in mind — each and every one of them is far too sophisticated to resort to a theme worthy of Hallmark — though it’s worth pointing out that this nevertheless occurs. The relief of walking from the cold gray outdoors into a warm white space covered in colorful bursts of natural life is hard to deny.
First stop: the vases, because what’s the point of having cut flowers if you’ve nowhere to put them? At PLHK, a diminutive gallery that consistently shows artworks of an outsized verve, the Danish artist Marie Herwald Hermann offers a series of threedimensional still lifes. Nearly everything in “Bit by Bit Above the Edge of Things” is ceramic: the glazed stoneware shelves, the perfectly compact porcelain vessels arranged on them just so, the lumpy ropes of clay nailed to the wall in this or that gesture. Colors come in impossibly subtle shades of tongue and cloud, sunflower and teal. Some are glossy and some are not, some are textured and some are smooth: noting the differences feels pleasantly pedagogic.
What might go in Hermann’s vessels, notwithstanding the fact that despite being empty they lack for nothing? Perhaps Iris Bernblum’s black watercolors of palm and succulent and other shoots, currently on display in “No Tomorrow,” a two-person show with Nelly Agassi at Aspect/Ratio. Bernblum’s sparse yet palpable studies — of plants but also a cat licking his testicles, dogs sniffing each other, and a pair of birds titled “Two Cocks” — make up for what they lack in color with what they gain in tonal washes. And sophomoric humor, too often assumed the purview of men only. But mostly these paintings and an accompanying nighttime-in-the-forest-withflashlights video are bittersweet, with plants named for friends who’ve left, including the artist Sabina Ott, who died this past summer, and with a sense of responsibility for the wild things we try to tame. Best to pot them in loamy soil, water often and hope for good luck.
No matter how well cared for, though, flowers will eventually wilt, shed their petals and die. It’s a quality that has long earned them a central place in the still life, a genre established by the French Academy in the 17th century and ranked far less important than history painting and portraiture because it didn’t depict humans. And yet it’s all about us: we’re the ones who care that material pleasures are fleeting, that life itself is brief. Still life is the genre of death.
Ebony G. Patterson, in “…for those who bear/ bare witness…” at Monique Meloche, pushes that theme to its brink in a show that might be described as vanitas bling. The Jamaican artist leaves no surface undecorated: walls are papered in a repeating pattern of wilted bouquets, purple butterflies cluster before the end of their brief lifespans, ten enormous cut-out tapestries pile sequin appliqués, mardi gras beads, printed fabrics, glitter, bejeweled buttons and broches, satin tassels and more atop already densely woven floral patterns. Can death be warded off with enough shine? Certainly plenty have tried. But it didn’t work then and it won’t work now: not to be missed amid the riot of ornamentation are limbless and headless colonial figures, a smattering of bodiless arms, and an actual funeral wreath.
Too cruel, and too lacking in the cyclical nature of flora, to end with death: reverse course, instead, to Jessica Labatte’s “Almanac for Shade Gardeners” at Western Exhibitions. Labatte has been marshalling her 4 x 5 film camera to make radiant experimental photographs for the past decade, but here she tries out something else entirely, both immensely satisfying to contemplate and curiously brave to have done: ravishing floral still lifes composed with cuttings from the garden that surrounds her home studio.
Hung salon-style and ranging from petite to gigantic — a shriveled pair of yellow-orange daffodils are printed lifesize, a trio of purple irises has a bloom as large as my head and buds big as my hand — walking through the gallery feels not unlike wandering through a hothouse, albeit one in which all plants flourish simultaneously. Labatte isn’t making nature photos, however, she’s composing precise and loaded compositions, ripe with formal, erotic and symbolic play. Strips of neon duct tape geometricize the hot colors of a rosy hyacinth and a branch of forsythia. A glass globe reflects the white photography umbrella that is part of the artist’s studio setup. A light pink pin sticks a strawberry.
Noting the crunched-up pipe cleaner and wooden toy toast in “99 Cent” — named for the price sticker still stuck on the cheap vase from which spring those seductive irises — I wondered if she had a child. Identifying the branch of black raspberries, some still unripe and red, I thought perhaps she lived outside the city. Indeed, in 2015 Labatte and her husband Eric May moved from the loft above Roots & Culture, the Noble Square non-profit gallery he founded, to the village of Winfield. Their son is now two and a half. The traces of these life-changing and life-structuring relationships figure in here and there, as do the bits and pieces of the rest of daily life: ear buds, a painted rock, a torn quilt, a rotted birdhouse, a stained paper towel. Impressively, no single element repeats — not a flower or a vase or a tchotchke — only the scratched studio table on which these items are sometimes arranged. We go on and we remain.
“Marie Herwald Hermann: Bit by Bit Above the Edge of Things” runs through December 22 at PLHK, 1709 W. Chicago Ave., no phone, parislondonhongkong.com; “Iris Bernblum & Nelly Agassi: No Tomorrow” runs through December 8 at Aspect/Ratio, 864 N. Ashland Ave., 773-206-7354, aspectratioproject.com; “Ebony G. Patterson: …for those who bear/bare witness…” runs through December 22 at Monique Meloche, 451 N. Paulina St., 312-243-2129, moniquemeloche.com; “Jessica Labatte: Shade Garden” runs through December 22 at Western Exhibitions, 1709 W. Chicago Ave., 312-480-8390, westernexhibitions.com.