Specificity: Myron Stout at Craig F. Starr, Debra Ramsay at Yi Gallery, Leslie Roberts and Cyrilla Mozenter at 57W57thArts

Myron Stout and Cycladic Art at Craig F. Starr Gallery through January 15, 2022.

"Where did things start? How to get to the beginnings of things?" queries Myron Stout in the press release.

"It has been noted that Stout loved Cycladic sculpture and was well-versed in Greek dramatic literature and history. He was awarded a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1967 and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1969, which allowed him to travel to Greece and Crete on three separate occasions. Stout frequently used mythological names as titles, and this exhibition includes such work as: Hierophant, Leto, and Tereisias."

Craig F. Starr Gallery is pleased to announce an exhition pairing the0 to 

"After moving from New York City to Provincetown, MA  in 1952, Stout began working on a series of intimately scaled works rendered in rich blacks, lunar whites, and silvery grays, bridging the sensibilities of Abstract Expressionism and Minimalism."

"Working deliberately and meticulously over the course of several years, he finished--or nearly finished--only 13 black and white paintings. In these works, he aimed to distill personal self-expression into highly refined and evocative forms, having once declared that 'a painting is the external, material evidence of one's personal myth, built up from birth within one's self.'"

"As Stout once wrote, 'the life of a symbol is in its refusal to become fixed.It is through its metaphorical quality that it takes on a thousand meanings.'"

Detail of Debra Ramsay's Twilight & Dawn 9_3_1, 2021, acrylic on cast acrylic, in Where We Meet Ourselves, recently closed at Yi Gallery in Sunset Park.

The work seen in whole. 

Smaller works such as Simply Twilight and Dawn, 2021, acrylic on cast acrylic, line the front and side walls of the gallery as one walks back. The materials are deceptive: I thought the color was sprayed in layers upon thin strips of mylar affixed to plexiglass panels.

Subtle chromatic overlays reveal the hand in irregular surfaces or taped attachments. That's what I thought I saw. But the work carried a strong afterimage: the liminal times of dawn and dusk arose as traces of color notes floating in the space of memory. 

The artist is informed by Light and Space artists of Southern California such as Helen Pashgian and Craig Kauffman and considers her works "homages to impermanence." 

Leslie Roberts in NOW WHAT, her solo at 57W57thArts Project Space through 12/17/21.

The press release states, "Leslie Roberts charts language into pattern-like works that are diagrams of their own making. She works on thin panels that resemble slates. Each contains a handwritten list compiled from the relentless flow of information surrounding us. Applying self-devised rules, Roberts maps letters into grids of paint, graphite, and ink. Her formal vocabulary encompasses linear networks, geometric shapes, clusters of dots, and dense layers of wash. Roberts began diagramming words two decades ago, as a way to escape her habits of composition. The ordered process of mapping language allows unexpected color relationships, in structures that can suggest glyphs, digital code, or musical scores."

"Sources of written lists include email, package labels, text messages, subway ads, online message boards, and instruction manuals. Panels may catalog acronyms, antonyms, bird species, or product names. Some panels document city life through signs and ads seen on the subway or street. Some record intimate text messages. Rosters of news headlines and email subject lines hint at political and social vicissitudes. These mismatched lexicons of contemporary vernacular offer glimpses of everyday life."

"The lists and annotations are finally inseparable from the painted patterns they create. Each panel is a record of thinking and making. Viewers may read the panels, or may experience them primarily optically. The writing is a resonant fine print. Roberts examines language in a search to excite the eye."

The artist says in Two Coats of Paint that, "Diagrammed words become paintings I couldn't otherwise invent." The resulting panels are small and thin, roughly 12 x 9 inches, their thickness between iPad and canvas. Matte surfaces generate an intimacy between the eye and artist's touch, via marks that proliferate from their gridded areas but retain their materiality, as well as blurs and smudges. While reading and looking are often considered separate, even antithetical, here they serendipitously conjoin.

Concurrent with WHAT NOW, Cyrilla Mozenter's Present Participle in Waiting Room at 57W57thArts.

In conversation with Roberts in Two Coats of Paint, Mozenter observes, "The letters are not so much to be read as to be appreciated for their beauty and implied sounds—in a medium (felt) that is silencing. I mix up letters of the alphabet with pictogram-like shapes that refer to actual stuff. Both have iconic power. Hieroglyphs and pictograms are “alphabets” of pictures. They “talk” to more than the mind. It’s all language to me."

Mozenter: " The 3D pieces involve the consistently unexpected thrill of a flat geometry becoming curved."

The sumptuous, oatmeal felt, the fine thread glimmering under light, shifting with the hues of the letters, and the cuts--clean but drooping, or diverting, like a figure gesticulating in a Quattrocento painting...

The work becomes architectural.

“I hand stitch industrial wool felt to make both freestanding and wall pieces in established processes that include the transplantation of cutout letters, letter-derived, and pictogram-like shapes. These shapes are cut out and then inlaid (and stitched) into position not unlike marquetry, requiring exactness. The stitching necessitates a devotional stitch-by-stitch attentiveness, causing unpredictable dimensional flare-ups that further animate the work. This doomed attempt at regularity contrasts with the compressed chaos that is felt.

My involvement with icons and symbols (of my own devising) runs consistently through all my work. I see letters as ideal forms with iconic power. They need to have lives of their own, aside from being 'team players' in forming words and sentences. I mouth their sounds as I work. (Wool felt, like snow, is an insulator and therefore quieting.) I am both performer and audience. 

My works are evidence of the experience of making them. Nothing is not important. That includes quality of gesture. The gestures emanate from impulses that could be seen as alternately reckless and lady-like.

The process of making my work is an adventure. I appreciate getting lost. I'm not interested if I know the way. If I don't know either the way or the ultimate destination, I have to be attentive to the subtlest clues that the process reveals. And to chance (help from the outside). I watch. What does the work want to be? What is it calling for me to do? Do I dare? What needs to be turned upside down, inside out or backwards? If I have pre-conceptions, I subvert them. I want to be surprised. I am, though, looking for a quality of inevitability. (A lawfulness.) That it couldn't have been any other way, given me and my materials in that space and time.“ - CM"