ART-TRIBUTE:Flatlands at Whitney Museum
The Whitney Museum of American Art announced two exhibitions featuring the work of emerging artists. These events focus on off-kilter and stagey artistic approaches to representation, with the aim of exploring pressing social issues. The first one to be presented is Flatlands, which brings together paintings by five different artists. The exhibition highlights an engagement with representation among these emerging artists.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Whitney Museum of American Art Archive
A tension pervades the paintings of Nina Chanel Abney, Mathew Cerletty, Jamian Juliano-Villani, Caitlin Keogh, and Orion Martin. Although they approach their subject matter in very different ways, they share an interest in representing, while upending our understanding of, the phenomenal world. More than simply a categorical style, here representational implies a designation, characterization, or stand-in for reality that intimates a certain falseness. In a society at once fascinated by and suspicious of the concept of “truthiness”, it is not surprising that the veracity of representation would be regularly undermined. Underscoring our unease, the artists in “Flatlands” manipulate their subjects in order to impart their own brands of bizarre unreality. Objects such as Martin’s boot or Cerletty’s vest, bodies like Abney’s and Keogh’s flattened women and places: Cerletty’s verdant field, Juliano-Villani’s underwater rock garden, are plucked from life. The departures that these artists make from perceived reality, constructing a figure from traffic cones, revealing the insides of a woman’s torso, suspending a home aquarium’s inhabitants in motionless perfection, key up otherwise innocuous subjects and lay bare their sinister undertones. The paintings in this exhibition heighten that apprehension by simultaneously seducing and repelling the viewer. Complex compositions, vivid colors, and luscious surfaces, along with subject matter that is curious, sexually charged, or simply beautiful, draw viewers deep into their imaginary worlds. Once there, however, the garishness of those same colors, the dizzying density of the compositions, and the ominous, frightening, or uncanny characters and narratives force us back out, disturbed by what had just intrigued. These competing sensations are at the core of the power of these paintings, allowing them to stay perpetually dynamic and exciting. The paintings in Flatlands also reveal a latent aspect of contemporary American life, the atmosphere of extremes, with fear and unease on one side and ambition, seduction, and luxury on the other. Around the globe, governments, economies, and the environment are becoming increasingly precarious, while forces of instability continue to mount and socioeconomic inequalities accelerate. Conversely, however, aspirations for over-the-top lifestyles show no signs of abating, and social media flaunt an endless parade of flawless self-presentation. The distance these artists create between the real world and their altered verisimilitudes leaves us apprehensive. We recognize ourselves, our longings, and our fears, and yet the mirror these paintings hold up is a funhouse version, warping our familiar comforts into something disturbingly revealing.
Info: Curators: Laura Phipps & Elisabeth Sherman, Whitney Museum of American Art, 99 Gansevoort Street, New York, Duration: 14/1-17/4/16, Days & Hours: Fri-Sat 10:30-22:00, Sun-Mon & Wed-Thu 10:30-18:00, http://whitney.org
