Simone Douglas, Parallel Infinities (longitude), 2024, ice and Plexiglas
Contributed by Michael Brennan / Just over a dozen photographic works, mostly on paper, make up this rewardingly idiosyncratic three-person show “A Matter of Time” at Platform Project Space in Dumbo. Leslie Wayne, a well-regarded and unconventional abstract painter herself, has carefully selected and arranged mostly monochromatic works by Simone Douglas, Joy Episalla, and Beatrice Pediconi. All three artists are engaging with water, time, and photography, and challenging deeply entrenched ideas about how photography can be realized and presented.
Four of Douglas’ black-and-white pigment prints on archival rag are pinned directly to the wall, no glass. The images appear to be superimposed conflations of water and sky, not representationally specific but clearly of the natural world. The series title is “Another Ocean.” The black-and-white gives them a somewhat documentary or scientific look, and their size/scale relationship is perfect. If one looks closely enough, the images are not purely black-and-white; there’s maybe 2% color buried deeply in the ground, flaring chimera in tiny unfocused orbs. The images are elemental, transportive, and nuanced.
Simone Douglas, Another Ocean XX, 2024, pigment print on archival rag, 19.5 x 30 inches (image), 22.5 x 33 inches (paper)
Also on display was Douglas’ ephemeral, time-based sculpture Parallel Infinities (longitude), beautifully situated across from a massive concrete column. It began as a cast crescent volume of ice – an ice sculpture – that has since melted. The meltwater was collected in a clear plastic vitrine below it. The allusion to our own global environmental clock ticking away is inescapable. And the work plants a sense of disappointment over having missed the party, like seeing a melted snowman. I’ve often felt this way looking at Matthew Barney’s sculptural remnants, which make me feel as though I’ve arrived a day too late.
Matthew Barney, All in the Present Must Be Transformed, Gladstone Gallery
Joy Episalla’s three works include the commanding sculptural piece foldtogram (rcm, isoclinal august 2, iteration 1). It is isoclinal, which in physical terms means that its folds are symmetrical and aligned in parallel. From a layman’s standpoint, it’s a giant photogram that’s been discerningly scrunched up. It looks a bit like the Sorting Hat from Harry Potter.
Joy Episalla, foldtogram (rcm, isoclinal august 2, iteration 1), 2024
Harry Potter Sorting Hat
This is not, of course, to diminish the piece, which has the provocatively ambiguous presence of a small mountain. Episalla’s work is not digital, far from it, but it has an intriguing indeterminacy of scale that I associate with digitally informed art, such as the Grayson Cox sculpture Half Story Mountain, another Dumbo mini-monolith.
Grayson Cox, Half Story Mountain
The shifting image of the piece also has a striking cracked-windshield quality that reminded me somewhat of artist Richard Zimmerman’s gargantuan cyanotypes, recently exhibited at Spring/Break LA.
Richard Zimmerman, Windshield 04, 2021
Episalla’s much smaller photogram, untitled (recumbent fold 1), mounted on the wall nearby, is an archival pigment print on wood panel. At 10 x 8 x ¾ inches, with close values and counterfeit optical texture, it looks like a charred piece of wood. Perhaps this too is a comment on our ongoing climate catastrophe. In any case, the two pieces together constitute a compelling major/minor pairing.
Beatrice Pediconi’s works on paper utilize a technique similar to paper marbling. Yet, like the other photographic work in this show, it’s nothing I’ve ever exactly seen before. Pediconi cuts the edges of large-format Polaroid film and then deposits the colored chemical emulsion in water. Next, she floats the paper on the stained water to capture her desired form. The result is distinctly floral, but with the crisp delicacy of a dried, dead daffodil. Here we are, at the digital eclipse of analog photography, and Pediconi is using a new technique that takes us back to the very beginning of photography signaled by William Henry Fox Talbot’s The Pencil of Nature in 1844. Pediconi work, then, is also a reminder that we are closing in on the 200th anniversary of the advent of photography.
Beatrice Pediconi, Butterflies Are Self Propelled Flowers, 2024, Polaroid emulsion on watercolor paper 30 x 12 1/2 inches
William Henry Fox Talbot, The Pencil of Nature, 1844
Platform, now in its sixth year of operation, is a subdivision of the painting studio of Elizabeth Hazan, who recently had a well-received solo painting exhibition at Hesse Flatow in Chelsea. In operating this project space, she has created an important public opportunity for artists that at least partially offsets the closings, contractions, and shifting that periodically constrict presentational space in the art world. Moreover, Platform encourages critical artist-to-artist engagement, which has become increasingly rare. It’s amazing what interesting and unexpected conversations can arise when two painters put their heads together and invite three other inventive artists to hold forth.
“A Matter of Time,” Platform Project Space, 20 Jay Street, #319, Brooklyn, NY. Curated by Leslie Wayne. Through April 4, 2024.
About the author: Michael Brennan is a Brooklyn-based abstract painter who writes on art.
Beautifully nuanced and intelligent review – thank you Michael.
Some respect please, for artists who happen to be women. Harry Potter hat ?!- a demeaning reference ( demeaning to witches, as well I might add). Perhaps instead of doing the typical sexist thing of citing works by male artists that the woman’s work reminds you of ( and run images of that work instead of the work in the show ), you might take a harder look at what is in front of you. And maybe even get the titles and media right. I generally respect TCOP and some of the excellent work of artists writing about artists, but this is just lazy and misogynist. It is 2024, you all.
The correct title of my work is “foldtogram (rcm, isoclinal august 2, iteration 1)”.
The correct media for my work “untitled (recumbent fold 1)” is archival pigment print on wood panel.
This review is lazy, sloppy, and passive/aggressive towards three women artists who have been working a long time in their practices— breaking boundaries and “challenging deeply entrenched ideas about how photography can be realized and presented” as the reviewer states. Yet he continues to view the work through the male gaze of other male artists’ work.
I read it as unconscious bias and deeply embedded misogyny.
We do not need this kind of entrenched backward thinking- at this dire time when we are fighting to hold on to our democracy, as we fight against the push to erase the rights of women, Trans people, queer people, immigrants. This review, though a drop in the bucket, is a trickle down symptom of the moment we are living in and needs to be addressed.
We all need to work harder towards an equal and just world.
#ceasefirenow
Thanks for your comments Carrie Yamaoka and Joy Episalla. Always good too hear other points of view. Thanks for reminding us that we all need to work even fucking harder. The info about your titles and materials has been corrected. We were always planning to add more images of work in the show, and we still will, but we wanted to to post the piece asap while there is still time to see the exhibition.
Sharon Butler- thank you for updating the review with the correct information of my two works.
I write as a theorist and historian of photography and an artist who has published on Episalla’s foldtograms to ask that the editors of Two Coats of Paint not just do better next time but act responsibly now and reconsider and correct this “review”–in particular its outrageously unfounded projections and wild associationism. While the unhinged comparisons of Episalla’s foldtograms to cultural forms and works of art with which it has no relation may reveal more than the writer and TCOP may wish about bias, there is really no excuse on the part of the magazine for not leaving them on the editing floor and certainly no justification for taking the time and doing the labor to amplify them with image reproductions. This is not just a point of view. Engaging in curating “provocative conversations” does not mean we leave our ethics at the door.
Jill — Thanks for reading Two Coats of Paint and contributing to the conversation.
As curator of the show, I would like to respond to these comments with some context. I have thought about the idea for this exhibition for several years, slowly gathering and aggregating images in my mind of what the cross pollination of materials, processes, and conceptual visions under the umbrella of “photography” could look like in a shared space. Once that came together, the fact that all three artists I chose were women was for me a serendipitous but very welcomed aspect. After all, women are still struggling to have their work seen and exhibited, and as a woman artist myself who is fortunate to have had years of solid representation, I am all the more aware of how I am in a unique position to help my fellow female artists gain traction.
It took me reading Carrie Yamaoka’s comments to register that all of the artists Brennan used as references were male, and it woke me out of my slumber. Carrie and Joy, both dynamic, accomplished and extremely talented artists, have been on the front lines of feminist and LGBTQ advocacy for years. Their voices are strong and they have weight. We need them to wake us up from the slumber that we often find ourselves in out of sheer inertia and exhaustion. Do I think Michael Brennan intentionally chose male artists to compare with the women artists in the show as a misogynous position? I don’t think so. Is Michael Brennan in a state of slumber about what it means for women artists – and women in general – to have their voices heard, seen and taken seriously? Maybe. Maybe his review and the comments that it has engendered, will engage us all in some thoughtful reflection about how we see ourselves in the world and how our work speaks for what we stand for. I am sorry that his critical take on Joy’s work was so off the mark, but I hope this discussion will bring more people to the show before it closes! Come to the gallery Thursday night as part of DUMBO Open Studios from 6-8 PM!
Achieving equity of outcome in identities is always challenging when there are three, artists or whom they remind you of. Possible remedies: 1. adding one more so that there can be two of each whatever, 2. Promising that the next time you give several examples that you will carefully consider your mental references and whether they represent equality of outcomes and then possibly making up another of a different identity if needs be (maybe this could be done in a foot note), and 3. or realizing that with small sample sizes it is inevitabe that things will deviate from an ideal outcome and relaxing about it. This third choice might not happen untill we get beyond our obsession with group identities.Maybe analagous to thee color blindness MLK wanted. Or just use the best examples that you think of like Leslie did without regard to sex, race, etc.
“This is not, of course, to diminish…”
Seriously?
Joy(s), Jill, and Carrie aren’t the first people to be disappointed with a review of a show, and I credit them for responding honestly and passionately. But, as publisher of Two Coats of Paint, I feel compelled to clarify my view that, except in the case of a scholarly work, a catalogue essay, or an exhibition press release, an art writer’s job is not to give artists the critical context they prefer but rather to articulate a considered reaction to the work that will sometimes be quite subjective or idiosyncratic. Accordingly, I would not presume to “correct” an author’s critical judgment unless it were overtly and indisputably misguided. On this score, I don’t think Michael Brennan’s piece on “A Matter of Time” qualifies. Regular Two Coats readers will be familiar with his pieces. They are usually comparative, sometimes humorous, and unabashedly written from his own point of view. As an artist, a writer, and a publisher–and also as a woman–I run Brennan’s pieces because I find them thoughtful, articulate, and informed.
Well… this piece is anything but thoughtful or articulate, least of all informed. The comments critical of the review aren’t about (and this is rather insulting to all concerned) egos wanting a particular critical context. A guy walks into a show, so the first line of the joke would go, but he’s ill-prepared to engage the work and has no informed reference points within reach, but rather than do a little research or parse the existing literature, he makes an off-color supposedly comical superficial quip. This is not what I call criticism. The effort of including the terf lady’s hat is stunning, especially egregious in light of this artist’s activism and what’s going on in the world.
So comparison is Michael Brennan’s bag – in the six review’s he’s done so far this year, Brennan has made reference to 46 artists – often from the canon- as a means to place the work of contemporary practitioners. This style of review has historically not done any favors for women, queer, POC and otherwise marginalized artists, because it’s been used as shorthand for saying those artists’ work is derivative. But comparison doesn’t have to be a rhetorically violent tool of criticism. So who is Brennan citing? Well, bad news there, I’m afraid because the vast majority of the citations are men – 37 of those 46 comparisons. Hmm. Blame the canon? Brennan is just using what he’s got to work with? OK then, how does he work with what he’s got? Well, overwhelmingly, these comparisons are formal – this looks like that. Unfortunately, this free association lacks real rigor, because in contemporary art the concepts, theories, methods, means of production, and social and cultural contexts that inform the art are also relevant. Brennan’s mug shot method of “this-looks-like-that” ends doing readers disservice, narrating a desanguinated account of legitimately vibrant art.
Up to this point, I’ve disagreed with Brennan’s way of writing, but I’ve taken it seriously. But the comparison of Joy Episalla’s work to the sorting hat devised by notoriously transphobic child’s book author J.K. Rowling is as bananas as it is insulting. Readers, foldtogram (rcm, isoclinal august 2, iteration 1) is a three-dimensional object that only looks like a witch’s sorting hat if you’re willing to contort your perspective to the point that that is the only thing you can see. And having done the work to trot out the comparison, Brennan can’t even manage to do anything more with it than to say – “See!” Well, I wish he had seen the work.
Anna Campbell, thank you for giving me a fair shake. I haven’t been keeping track of my own output, but since you’re counting, I’d like to add some more data for the record. I’ve been writing, voluntarily, for TCOP for about a year and a half. In that time, I’ve written 14 reviews in total. Of the 14, 9 have been of female artists, their one person exhibitions (I’m counting A Matter of Time as just 1). Three of my reviews were of Asian artists, one of whom is an Asian-American. One of my earliest reviews was of a queer artist, as revealed in the content of his work. I’ve written 2 reviews of straight white men, one of which was an impromptu memorial tribute.
I consider myself a journalist, and more of an enthusiast than a critic. I’m mostly writing about outer-borough spaces, and emerging artists, with an emphasis on exhibitions that are perhaps unlikely to be reviewed elsewhere. I write to generate interest and attendance in shows while they’re still ongoing. I’ve been told by gallerists that my articles help with foot traffic. I’m mostly trying to spark interest, rather than provide an in depth reading of work.
I’ve been processing everyone’s comments this past week. I’ve resisted posting because I don’t want to exacerbate the situation further. I’ve asked my friends and colleagues not to comment, not to pile on in allegiance.
Anna, let me first follow-up to your balanced critique of my style. I’ve been with TCOP for a short time, but I’ve been writing for a long time. One huge difference with digital reviews is that it’s much easier to bring in, fair use, outside references. Jill Casid criticized my “wild associationism”. What I’m hoping to do is establish an external context that might help general readership, or people unable attend an exhibition, read the work in terms of a broader, ongoing, conversation. I know that the canon is problematic (the first female artist to have a monograph was Helen Frankenthaler in 1975) but it’s what I have to draw from. In my previous review of Caroline Burton, this freewheeling method allowed me to tie in Lenore Tawney, and a Lenape basket, among other images. I’m not referencing men exclusively.
I’d like to address the main complaints about my review. Some of the citations of Joy Episalla’s work were off at first publication. I did copy these titles verbatim from the exhibition checklist I was given. Carrie Yamaoka noted that there were not enough reproductions of the actual work by the 3 artists in the show. At the time of writing, only three images were available on the gallery’s website. I asked for, and received a separate image of Simone Douglas’ sculpture. As Sharon Butler indicated previously, the idea was to flesh out the article with more images later in the interest of publishing the review sooner, before the show closed. I saw A Matter of Time last Friday afternoon. I wrote and submitted the article for editing that same day. I loved the show, I was excited about it, and I wanted to help promote it. I was writing as a journalist on deadline.
I apologize to Joy Episalla. I apologize to all the readers I’ve offended for using Rowling’s Sorting Hat as a reference. I gave a textbook definition of isoclinal in the article. I thought that was still too opaque, and I wanted to communicate the meaning of the word in “laymen’s terms” as it relates to Episalla’s sculpture. That’s when I thought of the Hat as a simple, well known, example of a scrunched up conical form. I was thinking in terms of visual analogy, not a cultural one. That was a mistake on my part and that is what I’m apologizing for. I should’ve thought that three times over given the controversial status of the author across the political spectrum. I was not trying to take a cheap shot. In fact, I think I was quite praiseworthy of all 3 artists’ work throughout, and I gave Episalla the most individual attention. At the time, referring to the Hat seemed aligned with my lighthearted example of the “melted snowman”. I then went to Grayson Cox’s sculpture, because for me it was an example of another “mini-monolith” in Dumbo. I think my reference was based more on location rather than the male gaze. When I was at the gallery on Friday, another artist present said that Episalla’s sculpture reminded her of “a cracked windshield” and that’s when I thought of including Richard Zimmerman’s work. I thought Zimmerman seemed apropos since he was also using a photographic process in an unconventional manner, in his case cyanotype.
Joy, I recognize that this has been very upsetting for you. It’s been difficult for me too. I didn’t mean to be disrespectful to any of the artists, and I did not intend to denigrate your work. I loved A Matter of Time. I appreciate the work, and I was genuinely trying to convey my excitement “for nothing I’ve ever exactly seen before”. The work in this show is entirely cutting edge, and as important in our time, as Fox Talbot was at the beginning of photography. This is what I was hoping to convey in 8 paragraphs. I also have profound respect for the curator, and the mission of this artist run space, as per my conclusion.
This incident is sad for me. I’ve had a deep admiration for Carrie Yamaoka’s work for 30 years now, and the Bowery show that’s she’s presently in is exactly the kind of show I specialize in and enjoy writing about. I’ve been waiting to write about her work, and I regret that’s no longer possible because everything has been tainted by my absent-minded inclusion of a fictional hat. Joy, did you not see any level of appreciation for your work on my part in this brief review? If I were truly lazy or sloppy would I have bothered to clarify your CV with you beforehand? If I were a misogynist, would I be reviewing a show of three women, curated by woman, in a woman run alternative space? I am truly sorry I did you a disservice. Like you, I also believe in democracy. I believe in the democracy of free association too. As someone who voted for Mondale in 1984, I also loathe “trickle down” anything. My apology is now longer than my review, but it is genuine, and I promise you, sincerely, I’ll be examining my “unconscious bias”.
Never seen so many people upset about a positive review.