Contemporary Color

An Online Exhibition

Juried by Chloe Wyma

Color is both material and support in Lesley Bodzy’s Conceal the Pain of Adolescence, 2021, comprising draped skins of marigold and periwinkle paint. The play of complementary hues echoes across the ethereal planes of Nancy Ivanhoe’s mesh wall sculpture, the colored rag paper of Gail Shaw-Clemons’s three-dimensional monotype print, and Karen Benton’s twisted ribbons of recycled yoga matting, which pastiche contemporary wellness culture and the flaccid antiforms of postminimalism.

Clare Samani’s pendant daffodil-yellow fiber sculpture evokes the shape of a mutton sleeve, referencing the feminized labor of garment construction and gendered self-fashioning through an oblique poetics of texture, color, and form. Childhood paraphernalia accumulates in an undeniable matrix of irony and nostalgia in Megumi Harada’s chaotic ambiance, while Erin Juliana enframes gynomorphic compositions of stuffed fabric components within metal grids, suggesting architectures of support or confinement.

John Ralston’s painted resin reliefs evoke intergalactic topographies and geologic timescales beyond human apprehension. Reineke Hollander draws on a more familiar landscape of consumerism and disposability, repurposing a blue Ikea bag as a ground for hand-sewn appliques. Chloe Abbadessa, meanwhile, draws on Appalachian craft traditions in City Bloom, which gathers polychromic fabric scraps and cement on an intimately scaled canvas.

Shocks of green, yellow, and blue enliven this cast glass sculpture by Helen Bishop-Santelli, who here employs traditional artisanal methods to reconceive the myth of Narcissus as a journey of self-discovery. Below, Nate Ditzler’s glazed ceramic Beach Bowl, a hard form that appears soft at first glance, confounds sight and touch with deflationary, Pop-inflected humor.

Tender and discomposing, Simone DiLaura’s young swimmers are fragmented and abstracted by broken light on the water’s surface; you can almost feel the sting of choline in her Under VI. Color likewise lends itself to keenly observed naturalism in the portraiture of Kwanza Humphrey and the domestic tableaux of Margaret Brown, who here portrays the mundanities of pandemic life with subtle comedy. Below, Catherine Bennaton’s roiling expressionism and Sue Graef’s storybook figuration present varying approaches to color in contemporary landscape painting. 

Adam Brown’s deceptively folkloric paintings deploy color to expressive effect, mourning the loss of biodiversity amid clear and present climate emergency. The Chagallesque Two Minutes to Midnight depicts the incardine pageantry of the Red Rebel Brigade, an activist performance group that marches with the global environmental movement Extinction Rebellion. Above it is an epitaph for a Los Angeles-area mountain lion known by the code name P-64. Locally renowned for crossing the 101 and 118 freeways a combined forty-one times, the “The Culvert Cat,” as he was also called, perished in 2018’s Woolsey Fire, a consequence of the warming of our planet. 

Color partially elides figure and ground in Demetrius Wilson’s iterative portraits of blind-folded faces. Rendered in gestural strokes and repeated across a 3X3 grid, these unseeing and partially obscured visages undercut portraiture’s associations with individuation and visibility. Below, Timon YC I’s tenebrific underworlds and Mike Ryczek’s pink nocturne, painted in oil from a screenshot of surveillance footage captured in Rockaway, Queens, evoke the velvety abstraction of the city after dark, while the chartreuse glow of Thomas Knight’s The Green Fire illuminates an atavistic ritual. 

The iridescent and prismatic surfaces of Cherisse Alcantara, Mara Shopoff, and Kenneth Millington produce imaginary abstract space while remaining anchored in our technomaterial reality. Below, twenty-first century artificial intelligence and modernist color theory playfully converge in Anne Spalter’s “AI Homage to Hans Hoffman” series. The artist instructed a generative adversarial network, or GAN, to produce hybrids of two image sets: photographs of airplanes and works by the celebrated German-born painter and pedagogue Hans Hoffman. The resulting editions disassociate color from notions of individual expression and prompt reflection on the role of machine-learning in art.

Ara Osterweil’s envisions a phantasmagorical landscape of mysterious vapors, flows, and rock formations in Flaming Moon. Its Martian hues resonate in Maryalice Caroll’s biomorphic mounds of glazed ceramic. Punctured with oozing blue orifices, they call to mind the artifacts of an alien civilization, while Antionetta Grassi’s translucent geometric and architectonic compositions suggest blueprints for worlds to come.