December
Exhibition | Howie Chen
Art Topology
Occasionally, when a group show is well executed, the featured artists can seem like appendages of the same body. December at Mitchell-Innes & Nash has this sort of singularity, but don't look to Howie Chen's stream-of-consciousness curatorial statement for any insights into it. The gallery walls are far more eloquent in this survey of contemporary mark making, where the bold and the barely there not only coexist, they are posited as extensions of a similar evanescence. Tony Matelli's acrylic and mirror Big Tits is a mystical breath, held up as it is to the noisy exhale of Ian Cheng's DayGlo and Mylar confessional, Bigger than Your Blog (ohm Y God//Clayton Deutsch). Megan Plunkett's wax installation has the inverse power of Joyce Pensato's park paint KKK Took My Baby Away, so much so you might actually spend more time looking at it. And in a grand but extremely polished gesture, the show's organizer juxtaposes a tiny cork root and stone Dubuffet - the father of Art Brut - with Margaret Lee's Potato. They look, at least for one fleeting moment, like they were touched by the same hand.
