Scene

A group exhibition curated by Ethan James Green exploring portraiture, political context, and art historical references through works spanning Social Realism to contemporary practice. About In a single, wayward sentence, Wallace Stevens' poem "The Curtains in the House of the Metaphysician" expands from an observation of drifting curtains to floating clouds to the vast, undulating firmament, "the last largeness." The ever widening aperture of the poem suggests that the metaphysical is accessed by observing the minute phenomenon of our lives. The mere rustling of a curtain reveals cosmic motions far beyond us. The immediate is the path to the absolute. Curated by Ethan James Green, Scene includes works from Daniel Arnold, Drake Carr, Alma Feldhandler, Luke Hannam, Jessika Miekeley, Samara Paiva, Linus Alexander Hübell Salic, Louis Slobodkin, Joseph Solman, Raphael Soyer, Joseph Paul Vorst, and Andre Wagner. The exhibition begins with a pair of 19th century wood panels carved into trompe l'oeil curtains. Originally created for a horse-drawn hearse, the decorative black panels once concealed corpses on their journey to the graveyard. The curtains are half-drawn, implying an ambiguous sense of temporality, liminality, and movement. They are apt for a hearse, a psychopomp delivering the body from the living world to the hereafter. However, the lifted curtains also convey a sense of spectacle that belies their original function to shroud the body; they threaten to reveal as much as they conceal. By the same token, the artworks on view in Scene are at once candid representations of their subjects and allusions to things unseen: the political histories, aesthetic movements, and conceptual frameworks that invisibly shape our perception. In the Social Realist works of Joseph Paul Vorst or Raphael Soyer, everyday settings and working-class subjects allegorize the broader socioeconomic forces that impact the artist, subject, and viewer alike. Though Vorst worked in a Regionalist style that observed the specificities of daily life in rural American towns in the 1930s and 40s, even the local, quotidian aspects of his work usher in global, structural questions. His painting The Blacksmith, n.d. evokes an entire industry through its sensitive depiction of a single worker in a moment of repose at his forge. Each work conjures up not only its political context but also a series of art historical references. Throughout the exhibition, the genre of portraiture is a central concern. Andre Wagner's Self-Portrait, 2024, for example, captures the sitter's expressive countenance and posture while also subverting the formal conceits of portrait photography. The seamless backdrop used to create the illusion of placelessness and emphasize the model's subjectivity is here revealed as a prop, exposing the studio behind the model. Wagner's photograph makes visible what traditional portraiture leaves out of frame. This dramatic use of cropping is also visible in the paintings of Linus Alexander Hübell Salic and Jessika Miekeley, whose compositions similarly question where a portrait begins and ends. Many of the exhibition's contemporary artworks echo not only general art historical movements but specific 20th century artworks also on view. Alma Feldhandler's paintings reference images found in vintage photography archives, giving her subjects and compositions an uncanny timelessness. Feldhandler's Untitled, 2024, and Joseph Solman's Kathy Ling, c. 1960s, both limn slender, seated figures in a haze of blue and green. These cagey subjects avert the viewer's gaze and resist our identification, an impulse reflected in the suggestive, open brushwork and spare, ambiguous settings. The paintings, like their subjects, reveal only so much. If the frame has been likened to a window onto the artwork, then the notion of the curtain raises questions about what is truly visible to the viewer. Through the curtain, one begins to consider the histories, associations, and ideas that hover just in front of the image, its invisible valence, "bold to see." Read more Toggle Prints Painting Sculpture Photography