The Swerve

Julia Bland, Caroline Wells Chandler, Glenn Goldberg, Bill Komoski, Joyce Kozloff, Bruce Pearson, Sarah Peters, James Siena, Barbara Takenaga Curated by Lauren Frances Adams and Jennifer Coates The title for the exhibition is based upon a book of the same name by Stephen Greenblatt, which touches on ancient atomistic theory, wherein atoms normally falling straight through a void are sometimes subject to a clinamen -- a slight, unpredictable change. It is in this interruption of regularity where the action lies. According to Lucretius, if atoms were not in the habit of swerving, “nature would never have produced anything.” Taking this as a point of departure, The Swerve presents contemporary paintings and sculptures that explore the haptic and conceptual approaches to pattern: how pattern and its rupture are employed in service of meaning. Joyce Kozloff appropriates the iconic Islamic star to create a richly colored all-over pattern that merges non-Western motif with an American quilting logic, revealing the political in the decorative. Julia Bland utilizes an eccentric, loose weaving technique to build emblematic, symmetrical imagery that seem to contain hidden meanings, while Caroline Wells Chandler uses crochet to generate soft sculptures: feminist homunculi that merge cartoons with craft. Sarah Peters’ ancient Assyrian hair patterns become almost architectural as they frame and support an open-mouthed female: many periods of art history coalesce into a single head. Barbara Takenaga’s woozy forms radiate from a glowing center, as her carefully tended surfaces create cosmic vortexes. Bill Komoski’s lattices and sculpted holes on canvas leak toxic sludge in tongue-like shapes, as he channels the bodily via the urban industrial. Bruce Pearson’s white-on-white biomorphic carvings also make use of relief, embedding text within them: once your eyes adjust the code is broken. In James Siena’s drawing, a figure emerges from a density of tiny marks, she seems to be trapped within the edges of the paper. Glenn Goldberg makes hallucinatory use of dots to create an atmospheric world from which two tiny birds emerge. The artists all share a propensity to tease out meaning from complex visual matrices. Images range from figuration to abstraction, but the recurrent theme is an organic wavering between recognizable form and repetition.