Contributed by Elizabeth Johnson / Planned with hope and trepidation, “In the Dark,” now up at Studio 10, leans into post-election malaise and dread with work by Mike Ballou, Tom Butter, Larry Greenberg, David Henderson, and Kate Teale – Brooklyn-based artists whose studio explorations are unified through the color black, via shape, mood, and phenomenon. Designed as a positive project for unsettled times, the exhibit coheres as a short list of nascent strategies for coping with darkness writ large before it has been parsed, studied, and conclusively judged. The works share a resistant sense of seduction, anticipation, and opportunity. By virtue of piecemeal construction, the show sustains an alluring in-between emotion, just right for entering voids that are only partly plumbed or viewing objects that are but partly known.
Mike Ballou’s found traffic-cone sculpture Jug, Meeker sits in the middle of the gallery, a lumpen bullhorn, a dented cornucopia. Ballou says he was attracted to the crumpled shape as soon as he saw it on Meeker Street because it’s congruent with his Uncle Jeech sculptures of janky, repurposed furniture. He achieved the striking dark velvety surface by covering the cone with clay and coating it with light-absorbing paint that imparts the look and feel of wallpaper flocking. The piece guards its internal shadow, suggesting Méret Oppenheim’s Breakfast in Fur reimagined for Stephen Hawking.
Behind Ballou’s skulking form and capitalizing on its gravity is Larry Greenberg’s sculpture Twelve Cubes in a Row. Reading the faceted shards forward and backward recalls the intricacy and imbrication of Islamic patterns and “squaring the circle,” as Greenberg pursues and ritualizes all the ways a cube can be flattened. Painted in India Ink, acrylic Mars black, and Musou black (a Japanese product billed “the blackest paint in the world” that features nearly total light absorption), the pieces float on the wall, casting shadows as they fracture internally into contrasting shapes. Sliding is derived from the process of framing paintings andfeatures opaque and transparent panels that shift within a white frame selectively edged with black, defeating confinement.
Kate Teale’s drawings of views from an Oxford quadrangle, on Tyvek in graphite and charcoal, are installed with wallpaper paste. Her rendering and visual excision of the famous architecture, as in Slit and Stairs, use shadows to indicate particular times of day. The works seem to build on Greenberg’s architectural allusions through perspective, embracing the attraction and repulsion of darkness in corporeal terms. The right side of Slit, trimmed to the fluted outline of a quad column, is wittily installed next to an unprepossessing one in the gallery. Frame, a silky trapezoid that could be a cast shadow, is poised in a corner like a crowbar ready to peel back the sheetrock, anticipating more ominous layers beneath.
As Teale and Greenberg encroach on the white wall’s expanse by shade and degree, David Henderson’s Widening Gyre 1.2 translates the path of an airfoil shape into an unfurling form that touches the wall only at two points, initiation and terminus. Using CAD modeling to predict incremental points of projected flight, the pieceis both plan and product, a transitory idea realized in wood, graphite, and beeswax. Widening Gyre 1.2 likens a single thought to dark freefall from a genial bright surface, indulging “jet” as a pun on both black and flying.
Tom Butter’s Kaput uses an absurd machine to express the futility of human thought. A Rube Goldbergian assemblage comprising a foot-pedal control, timer, and a wire-connected motor inside a steel truss winds and unwinds unpredictably under stress. Stainless steel fabric joins these forces and parts to a carved black wooden ball that rolls and rams against the gallery wall. For Butter, the piece embodies the notion of “blackballing” – an action that is “secretive, and especially unfair and vengeful.” Considering the exhibit an open field on which compressed passion plays out, Kaput inventively marks a future point beyond judgment, when safety and ambition are exhausted, when even machines get depressed.
Greenberg’s Bogart Street space serves as both studio and gallery. Wooden floors with tall, freshly painted white walls and raking light from an industrial window echo years of exhibitions and installations. The show’s array of black and blacker pieces displaces only a fraction of the gallery’s vast, snowy brightness, barely intruding. The contrast of light and dark makes the latter look self-possessed and intent on transforming, like coal into diamonds.
“In the Dark,” Studio 10, 56 Bogart Street, Brooklyn, NY. Through December 15, 2024. Curated by Larry Greenberg. Artists: Mike Ballou, Tom Butter, Larry Greenberg, David Henderson, Kate Teale.
About the author: Elizabeth Johnson is an oil painter, art writer, and curator based in Easton, Pennsylvania. Her reviews and interviews have appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, Artcritical, The Artblog, Delicious Line, in addition to Two Coats of Paint.
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