Randall Sellers has his amazing miniature worlds lined up in a row this month at SPECTOR. The show has eleven new works and the little guys are waiting for your gaze through the magnifying glass to wake them up. (image — sorry no magnifying glass you’ll have to imagine the smokestacks, tunnels, aqueducts, bridges, ribbons of highway set on the rocks with trees and grass the jewels of adornment.)But the artist also has some larger narrative works with figures who might be giants inhabiting the wee lands.
People with worried brows or ambiguous smiles seem caught in moments of quiet interaction. They can’t keep their hands off each other, but they have the most delicate, exquisite touch — it’s sexy and familial. The bathers (image) touch each other and form a kind of human chain — for protection against the gaze of an oncoming stranger, perhaps? Or are they saying goodbye to somebody? Who knows. It’s a great image.
Whatever this band of monkeys (image) is doing sitting on that car is anybody’s guess. But the dreamy inscrutability is great.
I’ll have a review in next week’s PW but want to give a shout out now because the show’s only up to Nov. 6.
Fisher soldiers on
In Spector’s back space, Brooklyn’s Matthew Fisher is exhibiting more paintings and drawings of his trademark Prussian soldiers. They play out their lonely existences in twelve works of beautiful draftsmanship and wry affect. (image is “Brought Down”)
Fisher’s works have appeared before in group exhibits in the gallery and I love the half-sad/half-funny edge the artist straddles.
The individual militarists presented — tall and stiff as toy soldiers — are less manly men than embodiments of John Keats or Percy Shelley gone to war. Stoic and anti-heroic but also a little fey, they go fishing in their uniforms and pluck the petals off daisies in their solitary moments. Then they go out unclothed to meet the tide when the sky is red. (image is “Neap Tide”)
Fisher, by the way, is also part of a curating team and he and his co-curator, writer Christina Vassallo (together they call themselves MatCh) are going to have a booth in Miami in December at the Scope Fair. They were one of four independent curating venues chosen for Scope. The duo’s warm and toasty online exhibit, Sunday Afternoon is up now.
There’s truth and beauty in Fishers’ and in Sellers’ works.
