Contributed by Michael Brennan / Haul Gallery is in the light industrial section of Gowanus, an area typically defined by one- and two-story brick buildings faced with rolling metal gates. These house local non-chain businesses cast as, for instance, “Tool Rental,” “Collision Repair,” and “Switch Electric.” DOS Garbage Trucks, a surplus of Park Slope ambulances, and old-style levered voting machines are warehoused nearby. Big-box stores like Home Depot and Lowe’s are present, too. Uncharacteristic patches of big sky often appear above, bisected by a gargantuan elevated section of the BQE. In 2024, post-pandemic NYC, a truly adventurous art space, and perhaps an alternative model, has also emerged in the neighborhood. Premised on the defiantly alternative anti-manifesto of founders Erin Davis and Max C. Lee, the gallery awards residencies to artists who then use the space to present exhibitions. Currently featured there is Charlotte Zinsser’s first solo show. Zinsser’s aesthetic is distinctive, refreshingly peculiar, and not easily categorized. I think of her broadly as a conceptual collator of Americana in the tradition of artists like Walker Evans and William Christenberry.
Zinsser is not a photographer, but her work immediately captures an urban sub-world full of clues about local life that surrounds New Yorkers on almost any walk. They might consist of posted signs – sometimes witty, occasionally cryptic, often homemade – or simply conspicuous trash. Call it bodega street vernacular. Between stepping out of my home in Gowanus and arriving at the subway station, I invariably spot an empty Newport cigarette pack laying on the sidewalk. That’s the kind of thing Zinsser gloms onto and contemplates artistically. Much of the work generated in her show is derived from a moment of recognition and inspiration she experienced when she saw a hand-drawn lottery advertisement for Power Ball Billions in the East Village.
Zinsser is foremost a collector and classifier. She has a documentary impulse and favors a hand-drawn pen line. She engages in Mail Art, makes zines, and generally imparts a manila-paper quality to her work that has the dry whiff of a dead- letter office or a windowless elementary school library. Yet, even if her supports feel vintage, her imagery and vibe are unfailingly fresh.
Zinsser’s work is serious but humorous, capturing the anxieties of adulting, apparent in her inspiringly absurd Life Insurance tear-off calendar.
An easy association would be to Margaret Kilgallen, but Kilgallen and company are perhaps more about street cred, espousing a different flavor of folk art close to a carnival or a faux-naïve outsider aesthetic. Zinsser’s work is in a home-office warp. In fact, her installation at Haul – which features selected pieces of furniture, including a desk set – is very much like an actual office, albeit one whose real business is elusive and perhaps suspect.
A closer aesthetic relative of Zinsser’s would be conceptual artist Robert Gober. He presents, for example, what appears to be an ordinary stack of newspapers, bundled for the curbside recycling, as a work of art, when it is in fact precisely handcrafted and printed. Likewise, Zinsser’s drawings appear to be on legal paper, torn from a legal pad left out in the sun too long. In reality, she has drawn pencil lines on watercolor paper, which itself is tinted with tea to create the illusion of aging.
Art of fine and constructive deception like Zinsser’s calls for close inspection. One must occupy her installed office, breathe it in, to experience its total effect: venetian blinds, steel letter opener, wooden bureau, and more. Her fledgling show reveals a searching mind, conceptual confidence and panache, and a very deft hand.
Charlotte Zinsser, Haul Gallery, 24 15th Street, #207, Brooklyn, NY. Through June 9, 2024.
About the author: Michael Brennan is a Brooklyn-based abstract painter who writes on art.
a conceptual collator of Americana: perceptive analysis, informative, and evocative photos