CATS & DOGS

9 February 2012 - 30 March 2012

Carlson Gallery is delighted to present CATS & DOGS, an exhibition by Hanna Liden and Nate Lowman.

 

A long, stained canvas seems to depict a rusty vista, starkly faded in parts like the sun's beaten down onto it. A small note is tacked onto the landscape: britney, it was nice to see you again. sorry we didn’t get a chance to talk yoga this time. maybe give me a call sometime. ian. The readymade insult of an insipid flirtation, left to a waitress by her customer, floats on a huge marked and scuffed expanse. Shifting between picture and ground, its surface evokes both the weathered environs of rooftops, garage floors, and driveways, and painterly abstraction designated as pop syntax.
Having worked and exhibited prolifically in New York for nearly a decade, the American artist Nate Lowman has forged a language of installation and painting based in collage and appropriation, merging cultural narrative with personal experience. In this series of works stretched with canvas originally used as dropcloths to shield the studio floor, picture planes are also two-dimensional documents: the exterior to other, absent paintings, their marks are the side-effects of an inexact length of time. When punctuated by a found letter, a piece of trash, or a giant silkscreened bullethole - referencing an early series of shaped canvases based on trompe l'oeil car decals for which Lowman first became known - they draw on assemblage techniques of postwar American artists such as Rauschenberg or Johns, and in their controlled randomness, they also test the appreciation of chance espoused by John Cage and others with whom such work was contemporaneous. Remarking on the quaintness of these landmark artistic processes while simultaneously placing faith in them, Lowman's work can assume its own tonal rhythm of neglect and accidents, measuring time by their collateral: a tossed soda can may be mulled over by slow-motion decay, or the overnight mutilation of heavy trucks and all-hours traffic.

Especially in New York, umbrellas are litter, disposable: available for five bucks at the street vendor or the closest deli, pieces of crap only good for a few uses before you break or lose them. When it rains, these bits of cheap metal and plastic and black synthetic are often seen about, caught in drains or skewered in trash cans like the busted wings of some monster bat bred in the biohazardous sewers of Chinatown.
Wood-handled, plastic, or of the beach variety, the New York-based Swedish artist Hanna Liden presents her umbrellas immobile in cement, upright and furled, or stuck on a slick dark puddle, like grouchy cartoon intrusions into one of Isa Genzken's concrete World Receivers or Lynda Benglis' poured sculptures. These black umbrellas also recall those used to direct light in studio photography, a practice in which Liden has long worked. Her earliest works were photographs - figures in Halloween skulls and hoods lurking in striking Nordic landscapes - which sampled a cultural spectrum of gloomy kitsch to meld eerie cinematic tableaux. More recently she has experimented with mise-en-scenes placed within the gallery, combining representational sculpture with found objects to work a pessimistic-comic narrative into still-life photographs and three-dimensional pieces, which she sometimes likens to props.
Once collected by the sanitation department, those umbrellas in the trashcan are perhaps buried or incinerated, in a cycle bound to further irritate the cloud patterns and irradiate the beaches. Rain or shine, weather can be a curse on a benign or disastrous scale, the planet’s nervous system excited by the accumulation of our collective bad habits and moments of carelessness. The vile sidewalk silt that washes up in the street on a rainy city day is worse than dirt: a mutant peat soil host to cigarette butts, boredom, annoyance, and other nuisances which may build up and pour down the drains, be stretched and hung on a wall, or hardened in a block of civic concrete.