Francine Seders Gallery, 782-0355.
Through Aug 3.
In a not completely irrelevant tangent, there seems to have been some confusion about whether artist Liam Everett is male or female. Newspaper listings about Everett's current exhibition have gone both ways, and when I visited the gallery the other day a comment in the visitor's book complimented the artist's clearly female touch.
As it turns out, the artist with the woman's touch is male. That a viewer would reach for the wrong lens through which to look at the work is interesting, however, because it points down a vagueness, an ambivalence that radiates from it and denies you a point of entry. With certain work you have to grab on to whatever you can.
Everett, in a practice you see frequently these days, presents a series of disparate images and lets you assemble meaning out of them--like a slide show from the unconscious, an impenetrably personal parade of things. The show's main element is a set of 35 works on paper, assembled in a grid along one wall of the gallery. Some of these works are watercolor images, deft and natural; others are line drawings, faint and unfinished; others bear phrases, in the distinct randomness that we've come to associate with the postmodern plucking of significance. If you look long enough, you'll find connections, some of them sublime: My favorite recurring image is of what seem to be long, narrow lengths of wood--in one place clustered in a bunch, here beginning to fly apart, there floating side by side like the end of a pier. In another image, a length may or may not be growing out of the side of a deer's head.
For such gestures to work, they should be subtle--and that the connection between these floating materials, whatever they are and whatever their logic, works in a random but instinctive way is somewhat undermined by other, more heavy-handed pieces of this puzzle. There's a lovely work that consists of a deer, as lightly painted and fragile as the animal's wobbly legs, drinking from a dense, inky pool of paint. It reads the way ancient Chinese scroll painting reads, measuring the distance between seeing an illusion and accepting it as reality. But then Everett includes a piece that is only a dense, inky pool of paint, as though to emphasize that alone it doesn't read at all--which seems didactic, like the artist has no faith that we'll understand how context creates meaning. There are other pieces that announce the power of the artist to create illusion: abstract images of something, perhaps the picture plane itself, shattered and receding into the distance (as if reminding us that reality is fragmented, as if we needed to be reminded); a smear of white paint that crinkles a sheet of paper; a blank sheet that seems to tiredly tell us that no mark is also a mark; the phrase "je suis fatigué," which is either a boast or an admission of defeat.
What this tells us is that a painting may as well be of any one thing as of another--a democracy of images that is the inheritance of Andy Warhol's revolution (and was the unkind subtext of the prophecy that everyone will be famous for 15 minutes). It's not unlike what the German painter Gerhard Richter has done over the span of his career: painting in both abstract and figurative veins, privileging neither, as if to say that a painting is a painting, regardless of the subject. I like Richter's work, but it can, in the aggregate, feel cold (to use everything can feel like loving nothing), and Everett's images, although some of them are stunning, make me shrug: It's hard to tell whether the ambivalence is cheap or hard-won.
But perhaps that's the point--what one generation of artists struggles for, the next generation serenely, seamlessly adopts. On the gallery's other walls, there are paintings of women with their eyes closed, and between them are unrelated images: a single branch; a child; mountains; men in shirts with epaulets, hands raised as though swearing an oath. Perhaps these are dreams dreamed by the women: fragmented, uneven, meaning scurrying away like a fugitive mouse.