While I was in Chelsea yesterday, I stopped to see artblog contributor Anne Seidman’s second solo show at George Billis. Seeing so many of her stacked-line drawings in one place led me to thinking about boundaries.
The work is made with a series of rules–horizontal lines only, stacked to create verticals. The horizontal lines seem quite straight, but the vertical borders shamelessly waver.
The boundaries where the stacks of lines meet one another have a tension to them, as do the boundaries where the horizontals edge closer and further from eachother within the stacks. When they get really close, they emit an explosive smudge and become dense with feeling.
Even though these pieces are made with rules, the colors have an improvisational quality–a way to keep things fresh and free within the rules that keep things in line. There’s fierceness here, a concentrated search for lyricism and gesture amidst rigor and straight lines.
By chance, I came upon a Steve Baris piece in Jeffrey Coploff gallery, where my friend Lenore stopped in to visit an ex-student, the assistant curator there (right, “Landscape With Clumps and Trickles 7). Baris has a couple of pieces in Philadelphia Selects 5 show at Moore College. Roberta also gave a nice write-up to his most recent Schmidt-Dean show.
The other Philadelphia work I passed by was Judy Gelles’ beach boxes at lyonswier, which made a terrific grid of colors on the gallery wall.
