Three Paintings by Patch Somerville at The Front

AROUND 100 WORDS

(Above, Below Left, Below Right) Patch Somerville at the Front

The two larger, more figurative, more advantageously placed paintings broke the spell of the three smaller, more interesting ones. Of the small paintings, one suggested landscape, one still life, one, portraiture. They formed a trio about genre, subverting genre expectations at the same time. Nothing novel, but the voice was distinct and believable. These paintings were also about paint and painting as most good paintings are, to the faithful, anyway. There was no list of works, and the gallery attendant could not tell me if the paintings were titled or not. Bummer.

 

Art Books

AROUND 100 WORDS

Vitamin P: New Perspectives in Painting

I stopped buying art books when I moved to New Orleans. Our apartment didn’t have central air. Mold and probably insects were consuming my collection. We, a family of three then four, didn’t have the resources to sustain this habit nor was I in the same mind-set. As a grad student or a young(ish) painter living in New York, I had been addicted to Phidon art book porn, the glossy, sexy, presentations that one could heavy-breathe over in some craigslist dump. They took these big messy things—paintings—and made them intimate, private, your connection to them felt real. You too would be a star.

Village Disco, Displacement, and David Bordett at the Front

David Bordett, The Patient Gothic Chisel, The Front

I was at Holly’s drinking an Aperol spritzer. Tom, who is a writer, was sitting across from me. I don’t know Tom well but I see him from time to time at the grocery store, at literary or art events and we have some friends in common including Holly. Tom asked me why I had stopped writing my blog, which I kept for two years and stopped writing in 2016. He turned to his wife and said, "She was writing a blog about displacement. It was called…” and he looked at me. "Village Disco,” I said.

That was more than a month ago and I am still thinking about what Tom said: A blog about displacement. I had believed I was writing a blog about art. 

“The election.” I said, answering Tom’s question about why I had stopped writing my blog in 2016. Everyone nodded slowly as if saying, well, of course. But it wasn’t quite true that I stopped writing about art because of the election; it definitely wasn’t the whole truth. The last post I wrote was a response to the election, and after the election I did feel a version of what the late night comedians would say in those days “…because nothing matters anymore.” In fact, it was not that art mattered less to me at that time, but that it mattered more. I wanted to be in the quiet of the studio painting more than I wanted to be looking at and writing about art exhibitions. At the time I was painting landscapes from photographs I had taken of the Luxembourg gardens and Parc des Buttes Chaumont in Paris. I was also painting a pine tree that had been in the yard of the house where I lived near Marseille in 2004.

Five out of six of us around the table at Holly’s had moved to New Orleans from New York about a decade ago and within months of each other. The conversation had moved to New York and what living back there, now, would be like: the cramped living spaces, the pleasure of reading on the subway, and that here we have our own yards for our children to play in. 

A blog about displacement.

Had this been a blog about displacement? I went back and had a look at my blog entries, keeping an eye out for clues. I found that I often asserted my expectations of a gallery, complaining when work was hung too high or too cramped, but couldn’t those expectations have formed anywhere including New Orleans? Maybe not. I wrote a whole piece about the weird habit many New Orleans galleries had of playing background music as if a gallery were a furniture store. In that post I do not reference other places but I think the way I refer to New Orleans is accented, obviously not native. A glaring “I’m not from here” post was my reaction to the Katrina reflection show titled Ten Years Gone at NOMA and my irritation at a reviewer who seemed miffed that not all of the work or artists screamed NOLA! at the viewer. I mention in various posts and in various ways that my expectations were formed elsewhere, my New York perspective transported in my carpetbag. Like this, in the second post on the blog I wrote:

The expectations I arrived with were formed in New York and New York is easy to feel homesick for even if it is not your place of birth, even if you (sometimes) remember well all its frustrations on many fronts including art. The thing about making and looking at art in New York is that is so, serious. Also, it feels part of something global. When I moved here I couldn't even get a handle on the local use of the vocabulary I thought was universal in contemporary art.

I end the post with a nostalgic Google Street View grab of West 19^th Street and wrote as if trying to convince myself, “I live here now, in New Orleans; David Zwirner does not. I’m okay with that. Mostly.”

Displacement. Displacement. I repeated the word until I almost lost its meaning. And what does this have to do with art?

I told Holly and Tom and the others that last summer I stayed alone in my brother’s Bronx apartment when he was out of town. One night I had the windows open. I stood by the open window and I thought, funny, it’s quieter here than in my house in New Orleans and the air smells better. I thought vaguely of the word, belonging. The next day I went to the Met and looked at French paintings of gardens and parks.

***

Lately, I have been considering writing about art again. Tom's comment about displacement kept mixing with that consideration and so I went to see what was on view at The Front.

In the second gallery there was a show of works by David Bordett titled The Patient Gothic Chisel. There were three sculptural works and one photograph on view.

The wall labels for sculptural works were detailed and abundant lists of materials. When an artist does this, the materials can take on a kind of poetic weight. Included in the list of media on the wall label next to Reliquary was “Christian Louboutin red flocking” and “stalactites recovered from the exterior of the cloisters.” I asked the artist (who was gallery-sitting that day) to clarify a couple things. “What is Christian Louboutin flocking?” I asked (outing myself as more of sneaker and boot type) and by “the cloisters” did he mean “The Cloisters?” as in the New York museum. Once I had that information (Louboutin, the fashion designer of the red-bottomed stilettos, and yes, The Cloisters) I went back and looked at the piece for a long time. It was hard not to enjoy the light-absorbent red fabric, the meticulous (Gothic?) details including the lancet window cubby that held the relic, the so-labeled stalactite from the outside of the cloisters.

I remembered the first time I visited The Cloisters on an afternoon many years ago. It was spring, and I had taken the subway north to Washington Heights, to a part of the city that was new to me. And I remember daffodils and the view of the Hudson River looking almost like a painting from another another era. The air was new and clean-smelling. I was with my sister and it is one of my fondest memories of being with her, though the memory is thin in story and detail. My memory merged with the “relic” in the gallery and I thought, memory itself is a relic that cannot be encased.

Next to Reliquary was a photograph. It pictured the base of a stone wall, part of a recessed column, and an outlet with an iPhone charger and phone plugged into it. Last summer when I was at the Met with a dying phone battery. I stopped near a little display of books and things to buy, not near any artworks, and I plugged in my phone. A minute or two later I was politely told by a passing guard that I could not plug in my phone there. Looking at the photograph I let out a little, spontaneous laugh. This photograph was one of those artworks that was completed not on the wall but in my mind as the viewer. The particular sum of my traveled path—the cloisters all those years ago, my attachment to old European stone, my experience last summer at the Met, and my vague and persistent longing that envelopes art, Europe, and New York—made this work speak to me. It was not a blockbuster work of art but it moved me.

The title of the photograph was The Patient Gothic Chisel. The photograph’s title made a funny little comparison between the sturdy tool that had presumably shaped the stones pictured and the fragile and antsy little iPhone sucking up electricity, loaded with concerns about being liked.

My experience of the remaining two pieces in the show paled in comparison, though, as I have admitted, this comparison is based largely on subjective and nostalgia-tinged experience. The two remaining works stirred no memory, and so for me operated as a bit of pleasing eye candy. The unicorn (titled Superleggera) was easy to like though I thought the painted unicorn and color on the base were redundant and unnecessarily distracting. The piece titled Many Paths seemed both democratic and slightly cynical, saying something between Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces and “Whatever.”

Before I left I talked for a while with the artist. He said he used to live in New Orleans, comes back frequently, but now lives in New York. I did not know the neighborhood he named when I asked where in the city he lives. This happens more and more. I asked about Greenpoint like it was an old friend. I have not been back to Greenpoint for a few years now, maybe avoiding it when I return to New York because everyone I knew there is gone, and on the streets one hears more English than Polish which makes me uncomfortably wistful. Two women visiting the gallery overheard us talking and said they were from New York, neighborhood: Williamsburg. We all talked for a while about neighborhoods here and there, rent prices here and there, and art here and there.

Before I left I told David Burdett that I have a friend, Holly, who used to work at the Cloisters. But she lives here now. I’d like for her to see your show.

David Bordett,  Reliquery, The Front

                 

David Bordett,  Superleggera, The Front

David Bordett, Many Paths, The Front

May I Recommend....Art

Seeing Nature: Landscape Masterworks From The Paul G. Allen Family Collection, NOMA

And the Collection at the New Orleans Museum of Art

Count me among the heartsick. On Tuesday, a week after election day, thinking it was Wednesday, which is to say the free day at NOMA, I went to see the exhibition Seeing Nature: Landscape Masterworks From The Paul G. Allen Family Collection. When I handed over my Louisiana ID, the admissions lady told me "That's tomorrow. but for what it's worth, tomorrow will be crowded; today you'll almost have the galleries to yourself." Sold. As it turned out the quiet of near-empty galleries alone was worth the price of admission. But there was something else–

I went directly to the landscape exhibit*. On my right was a large painting by April Gornik flanked by two Richters. Gornik's paintings have always annoyed me. While something about her work resonates, maybe subject or scale, I find her palette and surface lack insight. Her paintings often remind me of one of those school folders from the 1980s or a poster in a college dorm room. But seeing her painting in this show was like seeing a high school acquaintance in an unexpected place, grievances all but forgotten with the simple pleasure of familiarity. At NOMA, in the middle of a national/personal crisis, I found myself surrounded by old friends. 

I am a painter and these are my people. I have known all of these painters for much of my life. Some I loved in my youth. There was Maxfield Parish, painter of my preteen romantic self. David Hockney reminds me of the college days with the club kids and ravers; the acid palette in his painting of the Grand Canyon brought this back. I liked Hopper when I was young...Hopper the  draftsman, the poet, not really a painter's painter...still, it was still so good to see him there. Avery, Monet. It was like meeting old friends at a disaster relief shelter where philosophical or stylistic differences suddenly seem inconsequential. I am not a fan of the Surrealists but I was so happy to see Max Ernst, that weirdo. Gerhard Richter! Many years ago I had an impossible crush on Richter's work, big, handsome, a bit aloof, paintings I could never really get to know beyond formalities. Cezanne's Mont Sainte Victoire painting brought on a spell of homesickness –I once lived near Saint Victoire–the dual recognition of brushstroke and place.  And Klimt, whose landscapes feel like nostalgia for places never been but have always longed to see. And Caneletto. Caneletto, always so buttoned up and void of humidity. And Turner, Oh, Turner...where would I be without you? This show filled me with, oddly, affection and such gratitude as if they had all come here for me.

On a less personal note, the show is full of B sides of  A-listers, which was part of the value of the show. It felt both fresh and familiar.

I left the landscape show and went up to the third floor. There, in the quiet galleries full of old things, the faces of thousands of years looked back at me. We have been here a long, long time, they said. If walking among the paintings downstairs was like being among old friends, this was like standing among the Ancestors, the ghosts of civilization. 

Faces and also objects, the evidence that we have lived, that we were here. Objects I have seen dozens of times before on previous visits came into focus. And words: a Japanese poem about a plum. Maybe it was that all that silence that stood in contrast to the past week, but I felt like I could breathe again. The air in a museum is unique.

On the second floor--I was heading for the exit--I just sort of drifted through the European paintings: a garden in Paris, a woman with sad eyes, winter at Giverny, a small plate of peaches. 

I thought of a poem I have memorized in English and Polish. I may have mentioned it before because it enters my thoughts frequently. It is by Wisława Szymborska and is called, in English, Notes on a Himalayan Expedition Not Made.** In the poem the speaker is calling out to Yeti, listing the redeemable qualities of humanity: 

Yeti, we have Shakespeare.

Yeti, we play the violin.

Yeti, at dusk

we turn on the light.

All week I had consumed an excess of news, wine, and leftover Halloween candy, tonics and exacerbators to my nerves. Seven days after election day I still felt not only bruised, but doubled over and unable to catch my breath, each news cycle like more blows. I caught my breath at the museum. This visit to NOMA did not erase the reality beyond its cloister, but it did feel something like a disaster shelter of the spirit. We have Shakespeare. We play the violin. 

* Here is a link to many of the paintings in Seeing Nature. No photos allowed but I didn't have a camera anyway. 

**Translation by Magnus J. Krynski and Robert A. Maguire

Close Encounter

Local Honey, Still from I'll Be Your Mirror             

Local Honey
I'll Be Your Mirror

Good Children, New Orleans

After a two-month hiatus I was back out looking at art, the day after the Saint Claude openings. I would have liked if this outing were like a tall, cold drink of water after a long walk in the heat but it was more like the first morning run after two months of being a couch potato. I kept catching my face in a kind of pained and skeptical squint. I kept catching my thoughts drifting into the weeds: wait, what am I even doing here? In short, I was hardly an easy audience that day.

I hit the back room of Good Children, more inclined to ricochet back to the exit than stay to watch an almost eight minute video but I was drawn in by the only piece in the room, a dual-channel video screened modestly-sized and high on the wall. The left frame showed a bright window from a dark interior and the right a silo against a blue sky, the view angling up to match my own raised gaze. I am a sucker for an un-peopled view. The next minute both frames were peopled, a single figure in each frame. On the right a figure climbed into a rubber raft floating on a pond or lake, on the left a figure stood in front of a microphone inside the silo. Both figures were strange in appearance

These individuals (as well as the succession of solitary figures that in appeared throughout the duration of the video) seemed to be different versions of a single character. This was my impression in spite of dramatic costume, wig, and make-up changes. All incarnations of the character appeared to be a man in drag, making no effort to hide chest hair and other tells. The make-up was more Ziggy Stardust than Iggy Azalia, more alien-like than lady-like, though admittedly I know little of drag conventions. Actually, my own unfamiliarity with traditions of drag made me feel excluded at first, sort of targeted by this character whose gestures feel at times both taunting and solicitous. Is this exaggerated stripper dance sincere? funny? Who is the audience? I felt a little self-conscious about feeling self-conscious. I felt, in a word, alienated.

But the camera work, sound, editing, was so appealing I remained the captive audience. Gradually, partly through my familiarity with and appreciation of the natural settings, it seemed that the strange character was the ET here, not me. This person didn't seem to belong in these day-lit natural settings: by a river, lake, in a meadow or in the woods. This character seemed better suited to a dimly lit stage in a club or on an urban street. There were indoor scenes but they were constructed with props and acted almost more like metaphors than places. There was a sort of playpen made out of box fans over which a wig moved ghost-like. Throughout the video the natural world and the synthetic world come in contact but don't quite enmesh. The sound of birds chirping is replaced by an electrified voice, in a Radioheadesque not-quite singing. A disco ball reflects synthetic light in some shots and a magic-hour sunset in the most arresting sequence in the video. 

This sequence begins with the camera approaching a figure, twirling before a sunset (left channel) and (right channel) a single distant light, mirroring the placement of the sun. In a moment both channels show the twirling figure we now see is the same character, dressed this time in cowboy (or cowgirl) wear: a cow patterned cowboy hat, a sequined and fringed cape and matching skirt, a cowboy shirt with silver cuffs, and cowboy boots. The face is made up with silver or white black-framed lips and two braids frame the face. A disco ball lays nearby in one scene, in the other the figure holds it above. The body of water in the background, wide and slow, might be the Mississippi River. This is an American vision, it occurs to me. Cowboy, disco, the troubled river. Oh and this sequence began with a sound like Jimi Hendrix's electric guitar rendition of The National Anthem. Not that all this Americanness meant anything in particular but it hit a particular chord of restlessness, innovation, and done-up alienation. In the course of this sequence though the character becomes less solicitous, less concerned with the audience. The twirling becomes almost childlike in its lack of sexuality and precision.

Watching I’ll Be Your Mirror it suddenly occurred to me that my initial feeling of alienation was reflected on the character or vise versa. The character was alienated. The character was trying, setting after setting, costume after costume, to express something, to achieve something, to be a part of something, to connect with me, the viewer. While the character persisted in isolation, the video absolutely made contact.  

Local Honey                               Still from  I'll Be Your Mirror, Courtesy of the Artist                                     Good Children, New Orleans

Going Outside

Unfiltered Visions, 20th Century Self-Taught American Art
NOMA, New Orleans

Henry Darger       (detail) Hurry It'll Explode Any Minute Now

I have walked through many museum exhibitions of so-called outsider art without stopping. My resistance is usually visual: quilts, raw wood sculpture, and whirligigs, I just don't see much that draws me over. My response to art usually begins with physical attraction followed by a more intellectual engagement with a work's conceptual aspects. I rarely experience instant chemistry. in exhibitions of self-taught art. Without getting too far into into the problematic

Ike Morgan  Portrait of George Washington  (Sorry about the reflection!)

labels–outsider, self-taught, and folk art–the set up is that one is not expected to consider the work of self-taught artists within the canon of Western Art History or within the context of contemporary art.

Considering my tastes and habits, when I looked in on Unfiltered Visions I didn't expect I'd stay as long as I did. I hadn't known Henry Darger was there and his work is always worth seeing. Hurry It'll Explode Any Minute Now...is no exception and is the show's obvious superstar. But there was also this fantastic ink and pastel Portrait of George Washington by Ike Morgan. This drawing was a stunning mix of familiar and strange. The subject is of course irresistibly loaded. 

Holland Cotter once wrote, "...the question remains of where, in the concept of outsider art, the stress should fall: on outsider or on art?" Both artists have biographies that situate them outside of the art world and are stories worth looking into. But for me the work itself more than holds its own in any room. 

Face Values, Last Call!

Cristina Molina Ice of the World, The Front

Erica Lambertson Pancake Face, Good Children

Latoya M. Hobbs Angelica, Staple Goods

This is the last weekend to see the shows on and off Saint Claude. 

Christina Molina's Ice of the World, a roughly four minute video, is alone worth going out for. It is the heart of her show titled The Matriarchs at The Front and informs the portrait and still life photographs that make up the rest of the show. I went home and saw the video again on the artist's Vimeo page; I liked it that much.

If you go to The Front, you should cross the street and see Erica Lambertson's funny little little oil on panel painting titled Pancake Face in a fundraiser/group show at Good Children. 

I plan to stop into Staple Goods to see the work of Latoya M. Hobbs for the first time. I saw these prints on the Staple Goods website just now. This will be one of those I've-only-seen-you-online encounters and I am hoping the work and I hit it off in person.

These shows will close Sunday, June 5. 

Cristina Molina      Ice of the World, Installation View The Matriarchs      The Front

Erica Lambertson     Pancake Face       Good Children

LaToya M. Hobbs      Angelica       Staple Goods

So That's a Thing? The Pleasures and Pains of Not Being in the Know

Phone Booth Koozie on St James Street, New Orleans

Never Trump Phone Booth Koozie, St James Street, New Orleans
.
Connie Shea at Ten Gallery, New Orleans
.
False Flags at Pelican Bomb, New Orleans

Craftivism. Yarn Bombing. Yeah, I missed that whole thing. So when I saw this Never Trump phone booth koozie on St James Street yesterday I looked at it in naive wonder. 

A couple of days earlier I was talking with the artist Connie Shea who was gallery sitting her show at Ten. I confessed to her that I often struggled with work described as fiber art. Part of my resistance to this show was the way these woven pieces seemed to unquestioningly adopt the language of the gallery, the wall, even the painter's stretcher, and even the picture frame.

Then I saw the phone booth wearing a political sweater. I stopped and looked at it curiously. I marveled at the fact that it was made at all, that it was anonymous; it was funny and bizarre. Not knowing that this existed in a context I considered and tried to interpret its elements: It covered a broken phone booth, it suggested the lines of communication might be down or obsolete. It was a thing made at home by hand, by a real individual. It's maker was most likely female; gender is playing a new role in this presidential race. It deployed the colors, stripes and stars of the American Flag, as if to say "Never Trump, but I am American, yes." I thought, Jeeze this thing is wonderfully absurd! And I "got it" in its absurdity. I get what it is, why it is, and where it is. And then, telling people about this phone booth I learned it was, as they say, a thing.

False Flags    at Pelican Bomb   Installation View

There is a reason Street Art is on the street, public art in the public space. There is a reason Political Art can struggle in the calm space of a gallery. But sometimes it's like tapas for thought, offering sampling of media connected by a concept. Two months ago, I went to the opening of Pelican Bomb's inaugural show, False Flags curated by Noah Simblist. I returned yesterday, the final day of the exhibition. This was a group show united by the nine artists' explorations of nationalism flags, both as an object and a concept. 

Unfortunately, someone had walked off with the gallery's last list of artists and works (the gallery attendant looked around but could not locate another one). Without the titles it was hard to enter some of the individual works and hard to view the works as individual. In a way this served the thesis; politics are not about the individual. Or, when they become about the individual (ahem) we are in trouble. The works offer cohesion not only in theme, but in palette, edges (all works are geometric), and scale. But much of this work about geopolitics (seen in my case, without names or titles) felt impersonal. Like the NPR effect, it was about all the right things but the content was sort of homogenized by the context. Or to return to the tapas metaphor, each serving was visually distinct, but I couldn't sense the maker or terroir behind them. I thought of Roberta Smith's comment in Interview Magazine about the totality of artwork, "it's political, it's pleasurable, and it's personal all at once. If you stress one over the other, things can get out of whack." I appreciate local opportunities to see new work and I'm curious to see more by these artists, if only online, to investigate where they are from, what else they make, and how these concepts play out in the rest of their work. 

Connie Shea    White #1    Ten Gallery

Some gestures seem inherently personal, like knitting. Some art forms seem to offer endless variation without becoming repetitive while others seem quickly tapped by use. Sometimes the gallery is the perfect space to share and distill ideas; sometimes ideas feel fresher in fresh air. What is fresh to one person (apparently living under a rock) will already be state to others. This article about subversive knitting in The New York Times (2011, in the Fashion and Style section, IMD) is interesting because it includes an apolitical origin story from a retail space in Houston, a terse statement from New York artist Agata Oleksiak a.k.a. Olek ("I don't yarn bomb, I make art.") and the inevitable absorption by Capitalism: a Toyota Prius wearing a Christmas Sweater knit by Magda Sayeg who according to the Times article and her own website, is widely considered the mother of yarn bombing.

Goodnight, Good World

From Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise Brown, Illustrated by Clement Hurd

Trying to look at art with my children, two boys ages five and seven, can be an exercise in frustration. Pursuing my own thoughts and reactions while fielding their questions and trying to keep them from backing into artwork is next to impossible. I by no means idealize a child’s reaction to art, nor do I elevate their opinions for being “more pure” than my own. As far as I am concerned a child is just another viewer, and one less inclined to pick up on art historical references or contemporary context. I am happy to leave to them naive encounter; I like my informed one. That said, there are times when looking at art with my children, and in a sense as they do, seems to yield a particularly nice experience.

This weekend I went to the The Front with my sons. It was the Sunday after the Saint Claude shows opened, two Sundays before they came down and I worried I would miss them if I didn’t just go, entourage and all. There were two shows at The Front. The show Clouds/Cows occupied rooms one and two. The show is described this way on The Front’s website:

"Clouds/Cows, a collaboration between visual artist Jessie Vogel and performance makers Nat & Veronica, was initially conceived and presented as a theater piece. In this exhibition the artists attempt to access the same material through a different entry point by recontextualizing the work in a gallery."

In the second room there was an untitled installation. I learned later that it had been the set of a performance. A piece of plywood with a large, circular hole separated the ordinary space of the gallery from a scene on the other side. The gallery side was dark and the other space–pastoral, fantastic, and otherworldly–was lit for an effect sort of like the dioramas in the Museum of Natural History in New York. I was also reminded of a book I had as a child, a book I now read to my children each year at Easter time. We read it just yesterday. 

In the book, titled The Country Bunny and the Little Gold Shoes by Du Bose Heyward, illustrated by Marjorie Hack, there is an Easter egg with a tiny scene inside. Looking for the proper name for “eggs with scenes inside” I found an article about Victorian sugar eggs in The New York Times. The article is titled The Better World Inside The Sugar Egg. Exactly. This idea of an idyllic world you can only look into goes back so far in my consciousness that is seems to predate my consciousness. This idyllic place, this illusion inside the egg, or illustration, or diorama, is so perfect that as a child you pine for it though, what do you know about pining? This pining is at the very root of my addiction of looking into paintings, of making them. This piece at The Front, seeing it with my children too I suppose, reminded me of the early magic of the enchanted view, the promise of an alternative and perfect place.

"It’s a cloud!" one of my sons said. "It’s a rabbit!" the other added. Floating above the grass was a rabbit-shaped cloud! There was real green grass on the ground! And carrot stubs! Not the slimy nubbed kind that you buy in a crowded plastic bag at the grocery store but the fresh air market kind that look more natural, more old fashioned, more like we really want carrots to look! This word “real” hovered in my mind , a crucial part of my experience looking at this piece.

This rabbit-shaped cloud was made of wool, I think. Wait, back up: I am still not sure if it was really rabbit-shaped or if my sons and I imagined it, though I find the carrots a pretty good clue that we were on the right track. Inside this cloud were the bluish flickerings you see sometimes in a lone thundercloud. I don’t suppose Victorian sugar eggs or children's books were on the minds of the artists, but still...through a circular hole was a landscape over which floated a rabbit-shaped thundercloud. I was reminded of another children’s book, two, actually, written by Margaret Wise Brown and illustrated by Clement Hurd: Good Night Moon and The Runaway Bunny. In the former there are illustrations of a sort of weird, slow, idealized world held together by dreamy lines like “Goodnight nobody...Goodnight mush.” In The Runaway Bunny there is …wait for it…a rabbit shaped cloud!

From The Runaway Bunny by Margaret Wise Brown, Illustrated by Clement Hurd

Because my children were there I was not tempted to think too hard about the meaning or making of this installation and for that I am glad. I simply enjoyed the cascade of nostalgic references it provoked. I am still enjoying them as I write this. And this is not the topical and overused collective hipster nostalgia of mixtapes or instagram filters that seem to almost eradicate true nostalgic response by efforts to seize and brand it. In fact, I am not sure that the artists were even going for nostalgia, which was probably why I was able to access it. This nostalgia reached back to the recesses of early childhood, maybe just before or just after I dropped the spoon from the highchair enough times to understand “real” space. Once upon a time the distinction between real space and illusory space was nebulous. We learned to navigate real space by trial and error: dropping the spoon, trying to grasp the cylinder of water coming from the faucet, by falling down. The illusory world remained a mystery because access was available only through looking. We came to know the illusory world in pictures books, in landscape paintings on the wall, in small color TV screens containing seemingly tactile, pre-CGI worlds like the enduring and bizarre stop motion animation television special Here Comes Peter Cottontail.

Still from Here Comes Peter Cottontail

The New York Times article explains the remembered lure of the sugar egg: "The diorama was a glimpse into a blue-sky world, whose tiny inhabitants hunted colored eggs or enjoyed a springtime picnic. These were the sort of genteel activities I longed for, but understood were unattainable." The excruciating pleasure of longing, the pull of unattainable worlds haunts both art making and childhood. My older son is working tirelessly on building a hot air balloon. He wants to fly over the neighborhood. And why not?

Across the street on the ground in front of Good Children Gallery my sons found a scattering of beads, maybe from a broken necklace. One of the beads was a plastic, coral-colored peace sign the size of a penny. My younger son just learned to recognize a peace sign though he is still fuzzy on the concept. Inside the gallery, he was then enchanted to find a large painting of a peace sign, Study For Dark Peace by Stephen Collier. Huh, I thought. 

Today I woke to news of bombings, this time in in Brussels. Now, as I write this, the idea of unattainable worlds floats lazily in my mind with the cloud-like thought that everything has meaning, everything is connected. Praise the artists and children. Praise the idyllic world.

From Cows/Clouds by Jessie Vogel and Nat and Veronica

From The Country Bunny and the Little Gold Shoes by Du Bose Heyward, illustrated by Majorie Hack

Stephen Collier   Study for Dark Peace   Acrylic, Pencil and Enamel on Dyed Canvas