Cumberland Gallery’s artists don’t need no stinking frames
“Without Borders” at Cumberland Gallery is the Green Hills art space’s first exhibit of the year, and it find’s gallery owner Carol Stein and her gang off to a good start. The show is a survey of gallery artists, featuring unframed canvases and works on paper displayed directly on the walls. The gallery boasts one of the best rosters in the city and an exhibit of gallery regulars is always worth a look. While the show includes a few sketches by familiar Cumberlanders like Marilyn Murphy and Kit Reuther, I found less preparatory, process-produced work than I thought I would for a display of this kind. However, the exhibit includes interesting examples of how the theme’s parameters inspired and contextualized the various pieces on display.
Barry Buxkamper’s shaped, 3D canvases are never presented in frames and his contribution to the show is an example of a completely finished work that’s custom-fit for an exhibit of unframed art. “Auto Natural with Apologies to Frederick Church” presents a car crash narrative utilizing an arrangement of elements that ask questions about the artistic expression of the wild world. In the painting’s central image, the detached door of a crashed car leans against the brown bulk of a tree trunk felled in the crash. The green ground is decorated with stylized, black graphic silhouettes of twigs and leaves while the night sky is filled with columns of similar silhouettes of ravens, rabbits and squirrels. A distant city skyline glows in the night. Buxkamper demonstrates both our relegation of living nature to a collection of cold cyphers in the various intellectual models through which we mediate our experience of the wilderness as well as the dangerous vitality that is still embodied in nature’s endurance in the face of encroaching human civilization. Buxkamper’s painting-within-a-painting covers the car door’s window and supplies the titular reference to the Hudson River School painter Frederick Church. In “The Arch of Titus,” Church paints the eponymous Roman ruin in a pastoral light with the crumbling Coliseum in the distance. In Buxkamper’s rendering, the ruin is traded-in for the kind of natural arch one might find in Utah. Here, Buxkamper has reversed his formula, transforming a milestone of Western culture preserved in a century-plus-old painting into an ancient sandstone sentinel presented for contemporary gallery-goers.
Displaying Jesse Shaw’s large linocut prints sans frames reinforces the one-sheet-at-a-time process that produces them. Shaw’s prints are outrageously detailed designs that explore both religion and consumerism in America as well as the country’s natural beauty. In “American Flowers” Shaw’s America is a land of cosmic bounty – her agricultural riches emanating from the heavens themselves. In “American Consumerism” the artist presents a food chain that links from busy ants to noble migrant workers to burnt-out credit cards and obese shoppers rolling around in motorized shopping carts.
Without Borders finds painter Jeff Danley trading in his canvases and applying his oil paint to paper, creating works that resonate with presence despite their diminished substrates. On the night of the opening, I teamed-up for a gallery-go-round with an art world colleague who shared her enthusiasm for the femininity Danley was able to capture in his image of a woman laying her arms across the back of a couch (“Repose”) and a two-painting-series presenting the same woman’s opposite facing hands lightly gripping a length of rope. Where lesser artists might engage complex narratives to energize their clumsy renderings, Danley presents singular, intimate gestures that speak volumes in their sensual implications. “Left Hand with Rope” feels nearly sculptural in its fleshly presence – the precise placement of the fingers arranged in a gorgeous resignation.
“Without Borders” at Cumberland Gallery runs through February 6.
