After moving to two different locations on the Westside, the Sandler Hudson Gallery has recently moved for the third time to a new location on Trabert Street. The inaugural exhibition there, modestly titled Drawing and Painting, is a group show comprised of two-dimensional works by a selection of gallery artists.
Many of the works have a significant relationship to the earth and the Anthropocene. These artworks are connected by their depiction of the impact of humans on the earth and its ecosystems. Ecological and global concerns are not expressed through any explanatory material presented by the gallery or the artists but are present in the formal and representational properties of the artworks themselves — there’s a deep relationship to circles, the earth and the globe.
Cheryl Goldsleger’s painting Exodos, 2021, mixed media on linen, is a gratifyingly poignant work composed of multi-hued and primal colors depicting a globe with a concave sinkage at its center.
Goldsleger maps the earth through the chromatic energy of form and line to create a beautiful yet disturbing palimpsest. Thin and clear layers of color create a stunning pattern within the form of the globe and in the abyss of space. Linear elements wrap around the forms to create a tension that holds the composition together tightly. The globe’s sinking interior deepens the sense of destruction as the center turns in on itself. The title, Exodos, says all in its dystopian message: We will have to leave this earth if we fail to consider the consequences of what we are doing to our planet.
Pam Longobardi is an eco-warrior who surfs the oceans to collect debris and makes art from the plastics she rescues and repurposes. She is represented in this exhibition by two small collages on paper, Island of Refuge IX, 2019, and Safe Passage II, 2017, both made of defunct and devalued currency the artist collected. Floating on white backgrounds, these intimate works encourage the viewer to zoom into the picture.
Island of Refuge IX is a charming, luminescent, illusory landscape pieced together in multi-hued parts skillfully connected by the artist. The image floats on the paper and is back painted with a fluorescent pink, giving this island of mountains and trees a radiant glow. These are clever collages whose presence far exceeds their scale; they demand the viewer pay attention to the earth.
Don Cooper has been exploring his relationship to seeing, Buddhism and Eastern thought since he was a point man during the Vietnam War in 1969. His painting Eyelid Movies (Phosphenes), 2021, is composed of a series of delicately painted circles made up of pointillist dots floating in a soft-edged elliptical form which itself is made up of varying sizes of pale white dots with a muted light brown background. This image is what Cooper says he sees when he closes his eyes and puts pressure with his fingers on his eyelids to “see” floating colors and forms.
His painting is the luminous result of seeking to see what is not readily visible — the internal and its relationship to the body. This miasmic universe is a moving experience that comes from contemplation and the desire to paint something seen only under these conditions. The work has a relationship to Tantric drawings primarily used for meditation. Everything is present in this painting, from the cosmos to the particle, from the micro to the macro.
Donna Mintz’s Untitled (SH.01.2022), 2021, is composed of a golden circle/globe inside the square proportion of the canvas. This gilded canvas is richly textured with found papers and fabrics, and gold leaf.
Michele Schuff also uses a circle evoking a planetary form in Moon of the Silver Stream, 2022, a tondo whose surface is in highly saturated hues of encaustic and mixed media on panel. Her allover Jackson Pollock-esque lines create a complex fireball of a “moon” in orange, blue, red and silver splatters and drips.
Not circular but very much connected to a vision of nature is Alan Caomin Xie’s Deer Hunting, 2021, in a palette of nuanced grays. Made with graphite and silver leaf on paper, they evoke the luminosity of moonlight seen through trees.
Jo Peterson’s Pine Forest Canopy, 2021, also in black and white, in vine charcoal on paper on panel, offers a view of looking through leafy vines that create negative areas of the composition which are open and breathable to the sky. It is in these connections between form and meaning that the pleasure of this exhibition resides.
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Deanna Sirlin is an artist and writer. She is known internationally for large-scale installations that have covered the sides of buildings from Atlanta to Venice, Italy. Her book, She’s Got What It Takes: American Women Artists in Dialogue, (2013) is a critical yet intimate look at the lives and work of nine noted American women artists who have been personally important to Sirlin, based on conversations with each one.
