When It All Comes Together

Christopher Reiger
"Brewer's blackbirds"
2013

I recently promised this blog's monthly email digest subscribers that I would begin sharing updates about BAASICS (Bay Area Art & Science Interdisciplinary Collaborative Sessions), the non-profit organization that I co-founded and co-direct. Indeed, most of April's Hungry Hyaena posts are synopses of conversations had with some of the artists and scientists participating in BAASICS.3: The Deep End, our upcoming program on neurodiversities, mental illness, and creativity. (Readers can expect more of these vignettes in advance of the Monday, May 6 event.)

I've come to regard BAASICS as an important arm of my creative endeavor; it's a long-term project that provides me with a platform to help make contemporary art and science relevant and exciting to a broad audience. In many respects, BAASICS is a descendant of Synoddity, the cross-disciplinary organization I co-founded with my friend Michael McDevitt during our undergraduate years at The College of William & Mary. Synoddity made a case for conversation and interaction across professional boundaries and was, like BAASICS, animated by curiosity and wonder, something both Michael and Selene Foster, my BAASICS collaborator and co-founder, have in spades. Working on a project you're passionate about is invariably a good thing, but it's a particular pleasure when you team up with fantastic people.

"Private Frontiers" at Hosfelt Gallery

Michael Light
"Lake Las Vegas 2010-2012 20. 'Casa Palermo' Lake Las Vegas Homes Looking Southwest, Henderson, Nevada"
2010
Pigment print mounted on aluminum
40 x 50 inches
Edition of 5

I recently visited Hosfelt Gallery's impressive new space, currently home to "Private Frontiers," a two person show featuring works by Brooklyn-based painter Chris Ballantyne and San Francisco-based photographer Michael Light. According to the press release, the two artists "have been in dialogue for the past year to develop work that examines the human urge to stake territory and its more absurd manifestations on the American landscape." Whatever the specifics of the artists' conversation, Ballantyne's paintings are a terrific compliment to Light's large-format aerial photographs. Exhibited on their own in the expansive Hosfelt loft, Ballantyne's colorful and occasionally whimsical works would risk being swallowed up as bittersweet morsels. Hanging alongside Light's grand photographs, though, Ballantyne's modestly-sized pictures comport themselves especially well; their affability and humor endure, but undercurrents of earnestness and melancholy, too easily missed if exhibited on their own in so airy a space, are amply felt.

Square Cylinder: Sarah Walker

Sarah Walker
"Mount Meru"
2012
Acrylic on panel
28 x 26 inches

My review of "EYEFINGER," painter Sarah Walker's current solo show at Gregory Lind Gallery, is published on Square Cylinder.

Read it here.

Image credit: courtesy, Sarah Walker, 2012

A "Murky, Mushy Squishyness"

Allison Gildersleeve
"Giants"
2011
Oil and alkyd on canvas
60 x 54 inches

Last week, I observed that Kota Ezawa's animated video, "City of Nature," "mov[es] from pastoral visions [...] to more abstract, riotous scenes of muted colors and shapes -- piles of leaves and tangles of branches that aren't at once recognizable."

Allison Gildersleeve is currently exhibiting similarly "riotous" visions of nature in "Let Me Show It To You Unfixed," at Asya Geisburg Gallery, in New York. From the press release:

"Gildersleeve starts with the ubiquitous and the known, and ends with the deliriously unfixed. All we are left with are discrete moments of seeming understanding and placement, and open-ended wandering. Instead of fixity, paint's murky mushy squishyness reigns victorious."

Some of Gildersleeve's paintings are too murky and squishy -- these lose the dynamic tension between subject and rendition -- but her best paintings crackle with energy, vigorous hybrids of paintings by (the undersung) Amy Talluto and Cecily Brown. Plus, Gildersleeve has one of the coolest surnames in contemporary art (and that's fact, not opinion!).

Based on the gallery reproductions, I've included images of the show's two strongest paintings here.

Allison Gildersleeve
"Candyland"
2012
Oil and alkyd on canvas
58 x 54 inches

Image credits: Allison Gildersleeve images "borrowed" from Asya Geisberg Gallery website