Rest in Peace

John Haber
in New York City

Ross Bleckner and Zachari Logan

Tim Gardner and Draft

One goes to Wave Hill for the gardens. One goes for the lawns and views of the Palisades and the Hudson—or for the view of others on their terrace a tier below.

The vistas make an enclave in Riverdale, itself an enclave of private streets within the Bronx, look vaster than it is, but no less placid and picturesque. And the artifice continues in its Glyndor Gallery, where art often runs to themes of nature as a view onto a wider world. What, then, if Ross Bleckner and Zachari Logan look to mere silhouettes of flowers and obituaries from The New York Times? Rest in peace. If art is doing its job, rest in contemplation, too, and put away your phone. Back in the galleries, watercolors by Tim Gardner show humanity touched by nature and nature by humanity, while Drift hopes to redeem them both with light shows and high tech.

Sunrooms and shadows

Gardens and greenhouses put one in a scientific frame of mind, and shows at Wave Hill have often bridged art and science, like "This Place We Once Remembered" in 2023. Sure enough, Salvador Muñoz borrows actual flowers for what he modestly calls "A Sincere Gesture." Yet the colorful results look more like what a past show called "Flora Fantastica!" It depicts a Mexican god of flowers, Xochipilli, exuberant and relaxed, but enthroned and larger than life. Muñoz must jump at the initial X, as in the gender-bending Latinx, and he calls himself (say it aloud) Xicano. Could Ross Bleckner and Zachari Logan share a gay sensibility as well?

Bleckner made his name as an openly gay artist, with a kitschy but catchy take on painting. Like Pat Steir, Susan Rothenberg, Philip Taaffe, and Jennifer Bartlett, he brought elements of representation and the decorative arts to abstraction. In his version of "New Image painting," that might mean stars glistening in an ill-defined night. It might mean, too, white clouds in place of others lost to AIDS and of white blood cells destroyed by the disease. Logan, a Canadian artist, is new to me, and the encounter sets off more black and white sparks. He may also bring Bleckner closer at last to observation.

They work both together and separately, for the added challenge of seeing what they share and how they differ. Logan sticks closely to petals and leaves, and even the most ghostly outlines have the naturalism of a botanist's tracings. They spill out onto a wall, on the way to Muñoz in the sunroom. On paper, they may have the frame of illusionistic windows. They are, though, mostly made up and mixed with bones. A clay fountain littered with flowers might look at home outside, but the fountain has decayed and the flowers have died.

Bleckner still comes closer to abstraction, with streaky bars of oil, but his largest and most colorful painting faces a strikingly similar one by Logan. Neither quite coheres into waterlilies or a garden, but neither, too, is far away. In collaboration, they all but obliterate the obits, on Mylar with silver and black. In a smaller wall hanging, Logan includes black hair, so that the oval of an old-fashioned miniature might be private parts. Death here is sexy but with living memories. As the show's title has it, it is also "The Shadow of the Sun."

Muñoz shares the project space with Kamari Carter, who like him bows to her surroundings—not in the gardens this time, but in the Hudson Valley. Like him, too, she is looking back in search of an identity. She bases the three works in "Rekindled" on the lynching of two black women in Albany, on suspicion of arson in 1794. She denies the accusation but hopes to recover their fire. Her raw materials are rope, and there is not a flower in sight. So much for the Hudson River School.

For all that, the tone is less proud or angry than cautiously optimistic, as if Carter herself were on the spot. A video, in which she fingers the rope of her art or of a noose, is her Ligature/Signature. More rope forms a circle on the floor, but with thick coils around every inch, like the Minimalism as craft of Barbara Chase-Riboud. On a blackboard, the lynching becomes a child's game of hangman, and it does not take a genius to fill in the blanks. So much that one takes for granted, it reads, is only Pomp and Circumstance. And so much darkness is drenched in the gallery's sun.

Repay attention

It has become a cliché—taking selfies in front of something, when you should be looking and admiring. It can be a nuisance when that something is a painting, although museums after Covid-19 still, however briefly, offer moments alone with art. When that something is a lake or a mountain, the nuisance may be less, but the affront is all the worse. And what of checking your phone when you should be communicating and communing? For Tim Gardner, it is all just part of the scenery. If people are indifferent to nature, the landscape is indifferent enough in its majesty.

People in his watercolors may not be paying attention, but he sure is, and the landscape repays his attention. He works small, but he makes things large, from a distant vista to a close-up of a flower. Everything sparkles, from droplets on a poppy's stem to snow-capped peaks and moonlight on water. Humanity can only add to the sparkle, from tables basking in the sun to an entire valley of artificial lights. A city's lack of detail on the horizon brings out its distance from nature, but its white and orange lights supply Gardner's single most intense contrast in light and color. Theater seats in an LA landfill are a close second with their white and red.

He takes full advantage of watercolor's dual propensity for precision and freedom. Scenes could pass for photographs from across the room, but without the firm line of drawing or the fine detail of photorealism. It can take a second glance to know when points of light arise from daubs of watercolor or the white of the paper, most often the first. Gardner leaves little untouched. He is not above staging things either. Stars form a diamond grid rather than a constellation.

That staging may account for scenes with no one in sight, although tourism has suffered from the pandemic and his art is patient enough to wait for others to go. The frequent absence of people only adds to a sense of human indifference, and a boy really is glued to his phone at dusk. The viewer can see what he is missing. The scenery could have a personal charge for Gardner as well. I guessed, correctly, that he grew up in Canada from the country's flag on an overlook. The terrace's clean geometry may have one smiling at the relative neatness of America's neighbor.

Not that Gardner is laughing, not even at the boy with a phone ignoring a dark mountain, the changing colors of the evening sky, points of human light, natural light outlining the top of a fence, and a mysterious rock formation right in front of him. What I have called indifference may in fact be the urge to look within, and credit nature with contributing to just that. The boy leans forward much like a man absorbed in a creek bed. It does not matter one bit that he is panning for gold as a matter of self-interest. A standing figure really is paying attention to light on the Red River and rings around the moon, with the same insistence. They could be at one with the artist's concentration, too—or, before he is done, yours.

The very division between humanity the landscape is here an artifice, like watercolor. A camper on a lonely road may stand for the search for nature or the spoiling of it. Cats at breakfast can afford to turn their backs on potted plants. Buddha in Venice Beach is just a garden sculpture, but still something other than fully human. He also holds flowers, which connect him to the greenery behind him. But then someone had to place them in his hand.

Set and drift

There you go again, falling for the threats and promises of technology. It will make life easy and the arcane familiar, or it will distance you from reality and take away your soul, assuming you still have one. Both could be way oversold—or they could be both be true, only about something way more mundane, clichés. An installation relies on technical wizardry and clichés alike, with promises of its own. "Fragile Future" claims to "use technology to reconnect to the earth." Art's future may still be awfully fragile, but it can be spectacular all the same.

As Drift, Lonneke Gordijn and Ralph Nauta are big on promises. "Imagine a future where humanity, nature, and technology seamlessly intertwine." That may be a lot to ask, but all three components are on display if you look hard enough. The first room at The Shed holds light sculpture, as a single work or an awkward cluster rising from the floor. It may not look like much, but it is already shooting for spectacle. Its spherical bulbs on a delicate bronze armature could be right out of an old-time star's dressing-room mirror. They may amount to little more than Christmas ornaments, but up close they have a debt to nature as well, with the fuzzy surfaces of spores blowing in the wind.

The wind kicks in for real in the darker second room, as does a more dazzling display of technology. Points of yellow-orange light dart across the surface of what might pass for a reflecting pool, like the ones at Ground Zero, before dying away and then shooting off once again. They are seeds, though, powered by fans and illuminated by high-tech implants, both in response to a program. A nearly invisible fence keeps them from flying off altogether, but then a spectacle is always something of a magic act. Artificial materials take over for good in the third room, with shimmering veils of polyester and polyurethane fibers that outline a large volume just short of a cube, filled at times with more points of light. It too falls to the floor, like a stage curtain that has served its purpose, only to rise again.

From this point on, the volumes become more solid and more ambiguous in their relation to new media. The Dutch artists fill the fourth room with pedestals, for small abstract sculpture that recalls Dutch modernists like Piet Mondrian. Yet its colorful building blocks abstract away from cell phones and other devices. In the fifth room, the volumes become large concrete blocks in the sky above New York City and a greener landscape on facing screens. They become weightier still in the final room, in real life, while floating high overhead. Smoke from machines at two corners of the room picks up on their whiteness while dispersing well before it can reach their height.

Like technology, the work has trouble living up to any of its promises. Gordijn describes it a "surreal, immersive performance," in which you can "feel your body and feel yourself." Yet it is hardly interactive, and the space does not become yours until the very last room. Nauta stresses its redemptive promise when he says that "this is not the world that it needs to be," but the planet is not exactly changing before your eyes. Their work owes more to the ultimate in light shows and shallow spectacles, Infinity Rooms by Yayoi Kusama, than to Maya Lin and parables of climate change. It is more comforting than transformative, like the exhibition's lovely soundtrack by ANOHNI.

After its 2021 "Open Call" for emerging artists, The Shed returns to its fancy ticket prices and privileged ways, in conjunction with Superblue, Miami-based art sponsors and entrepreneurs. The Drift collective may feel a bit corporate as well, with its high-tech ways and team of sixty-four. "Fragile Future" could just as well be turning nature into technology as the other way around. Still, it is breathtaking—and the first ever to make full use of the shed of an exhibition space, from its partitioned beginning to its three-story final room. It has its own natural rhythms as well, building from the static first room through the light shows and a recognizable city. You finally do fully enter, and the promise becomes yours.

jhaber@haberarts.com

Ross Bleckner, Zachari Logan, Salvador Muñoz, and Kamari Carter ran at Wave Hill's Glyndor Gallery through August 15, 2021. Tim Gardner ran at 303 through August 13, Drift at The Shed through December 19.