Johnny Abrahams • Elise Asher • John de Fazio • Francesca DiMattio • Michelle Flores • Susan Fortgang • Hervé Garcia • Pam Glick • James Harrison • Valerie Hegarty • Gustav Hjelmgren • Justin Hoffman • Sophie Larrimore • Jason Middlebrook • Jackie Milad • Jeanne Reynal • Tony Tasset • Paul Waters • Cameron Welch • Rob Wynne
My My, Hey Hey is a group exhibition which explores the artist’s use of individual elements—color, brushstrokes, motifs, and diverse materials—that repeat or meld into an unexpected whole. In an age characterized by information overload and divisiveness, this exhibition instead celebrates the beauty of unexpected connections: to one another, to nature, and to cultural diversity.
Several artists in the exhibition collide a multiplicity of references: high and low, domestic and formal, across cultures, to create collage and assemblage paintings and sculptures. Tony Tasset (b. 1960) works with materials associated with the American visual vernacular and drawing upon American amusement and advertising. His Snowman sculptures immortalize this ubiquitous form, simulating snow’s texture with crushed glass and epoxy resin. The textured collages of Jackie Milad (b. 1975) explore the layered quality of her Egyptian-Honduran-American identity, referencing graffiti by young protestors in Cairo, family photos, poetry fragments, and American pop culture. Francesca DiMattio (b. 1981) uses various ceramic mediums such as porcelain and terracotta, bringing in a host of objects and techniques to create a complex assemblage of parts, and a new, hybrid whole. John de Fazio (b. 1959), the Bay-Area based ceramic artist, collides classic mythologies with popular culture in meticulously crafted objects. Valerie Hegarty (b. 1967) critically engages with American history in her multi-media installational wall-works. She deconstructs art historical still life paintings into component parts to address environmental devastation, as well as aging and mortality.
Several artists explore the grid: its lines and rows which can be systematically built and also disrupted. Hervé Garcia (b. 1971) works with restored linen, overlapping pieces to create a montage effect. He paints fields of fragmented and undulating forms interrupted by the frayed edges of fabric. Michelle Flores cuts clay tubes into individual molded and glazed ceramic beads, and threads each bead into ceramic weavings. Drawing from Mexican folk art, ancient hieroglyphics, and popular culture, she treats ornament as language. Susan Fortgang (b. 1944) develops impasto surfaces with thick acrylic medium and applies tape in grid formations, removing it to reveal what is underneath. In Pam Glick’s (b. 1956) work, calligraphic pencil marks cut through brushstrokes, as the grid is built up and destroyed. Many paintings are inspired by Niagara Falls and its everyday changes.
James Harrison (b. 1984), Gustav Hjelmgren (b. 1979), and Johnny Abrahams’s (b. 1979) repeat shapes and motifs to create auratic fields. Abrahams creates totemic paintings with thickly applied columns of paint. They are in dialogue with poetry, as the repeated iteration of forms result in a rhythmic meter. Hjelmgrem’s paintings are hypnotic compositions formed by soft concentric rings of color that emanate from a central point, evoking expanding ripples in water. Harrison uses daily drawings as blueprints for larger paintings, as well as textile patterns or motifs like clusters of geraniums. Guided by an intuitive rhythm, they repeat and expand across the surface of the canvas.
The word is used as an individual element in the work of Elise Asher (1912–2004) and Rob Wynne (b. 1948). A poet-painter, and one of the women of Abstract Expressionism, Asher blends calligraphic handwriting from lines of poetry, with color and atmospheric clouds of brushwork. Wynne eschews the traditional technique of glassblowing, instead hand-pouring glass into shapes that together form short phrases of text, both thoughtful and absurd.
Mosaic is another approach to creating a field using individual units. Cameron Welch (b. 1990) layers disparate materials, interspersing grouted tiles and objects sourced from markets or culled from Brooklyn detritus, which he assembles to form intricate topographies. Jeanne Reynal (1903–1983), a first-generation New York School artist, was dedicated to the ways in which hand-cut stones and glass tiles, set on a bias, could reflect and create light across a surface.
Several artists in the exhibition explore interconnections with nature. Sophie Larrimore (b. 1980) depicts playful and symbiotic relationships between bodies, animals, and trees, all stacked and suspended in flat, whimsical landscapes. Jason Middlebrook (b. 1966) sources milled indigenous trees. Adding gestures of acrylic paint to the vertical, sculptural slabs, he leaves the natural grain of wood visible, positioning himself and his interventions as that of a visitor in a long natural history. Justin Hoffman (b. 1974) is a ceramic artist who achieves complex surface textures inspired by the contents of archeological sites. The protruding symbolic forms which adorn the surfaces are an invented language, appearing both ancient and modern. In Paul Waters’s (b. 1936) paintings, silhouettes suggesting primordial forms and imaginary animals are arranged and collaged onto canvas supports in rhythmic patterns. He uses his fingers to paint, marking our inherent and undeniable connections to each other, animals, flora, and fauna.