As if a line

About

Rachael Bos, Gina Fischli, Lizzy Gabay, Max Guy, Anne Hayden Stevens, Paula Kamps, Nour Malas, Abbey Muza, Katharina Schilling, Oda Iselin Sønderland, Jill Tate, Noelia Towers, Alix Vernet, Claude Viallat, Jack Whitten
 

The nontraditional ethos of Slip House is part and parcel of the space’s history and mythos: nineteenth-century carriage house, turn-of-the-millenium barbershop, and newly-transformed exhibition space. In As if a line, works presented on the ground floor demonstrate a preoccupation with line and the grid, crossing the modernist and metaphysical. The second floor gathers artists working in gestural abstraction as well as those that incorporate a figurative dimension. Alliances manifest along the way, establishing a system of interconnected notions and aesthetic principles.

Entering the space, viewers meet line-driven images that negotiate repetition and visuoperceptual boundaries. Works by Katharina Schilling and Abbey Muza wax and wane between abstract foundations and realistic leanings, as the artists explore space and subjectivity through references to medieval manuscripts and iterating flexible spatial relationships. Gina Fischli’s updates to Joseph Albers’s “Homage to the Square” replaces the original palettes with glittery hyper pigments. The work of Claude Viallat is sympathetic to this framework, as repeated motifs and an emphasis on color evince the artist’s investment in measured impulsivity. Max Guy’s multimedia approach makes use of multiform debris and personal ephemera, which serves as raw material for poetic explorations of urbanity and literature. This discrete filtration system is counterbalanced by a 1969 painting by Jack Whitten. The work on paper demonstrates Whitten’s entanglement with color and line, navigating his effort to “photograph my thoughts.”

On the top floor, one finds works by artists that champion the representational format alongside gesture-driven interventions. For instance, one sees the contours of building exteriors and other architectural aspects reprogrammed within Alix Vernet’s sculptural output. Elsewhere, Oda Iselin Sønderland, rooted squarely in the figurative, brushes up against Norse folklore and intrapsychic matter en route to her depictions of a largely paracosmic world. Paula Kamps likewise slips into surreality, though her image-making process is set between drawing and watercolor. Through the hybrid technique, and the occasional foray into airbrushing, she negotiates the frequencies of pigments and interstitial spaces. In Nour Malas’s work, slippages between effusive brushwork and suggestive forms are all caught within the territory of abstraction.

Working across sculpture, painting, drawing, and the like, these artists all operate under markedly different conditions. Yet, a certain tether to the possibility of a line is counterbalanced with the desire to illustrate reality through discrete visual languages. The coordination of the two allows for fissured thresholds and potential alliances, where gesture and architected space can blur into one another.

– Reilly Davidson