Artist's Date #3: Notes from NYC
Some Tribeca Galleries
I wrote this in the morning when my mom was supposed to come to our Airbnb and she did. But she came two hours early.
“Mom,” I texted, when she told me her ETA, “No. I’m annoyed that you did this. That is not OK.”
“Well, nobody’s perfect,” she replied and then showed up at our door. I let her in, but showed her to the room she was going to stay in and promptly put on my headphones and wrote these quick responses to the art we saw yesterday, which took about an hour to write, and then I took a shower. So in a way, it was a gift, her early arrival, since I took time for myself in protest. Anger: a helpful emotion.
The day before was amazing. Olive and I took the subway just ONE STOP into Manhattan and we went to see Kelsey’s show: the jewels on the glossy pink surface that looked three-dimensional but are not, and sometimes the blurred reflections of people taking photos. Another painting is turquoise and larger and has more studs and Olive and I look at them all for a long time and I swing her body around the empty space in the center of the room. Kelsey is Olive’s old babysitter and she left LA a few years ago to move to New York and I kept telling her she should just show her photos but now she quit her job and is selling paintings, so that’s how much I know about this art thing. “I love how your painting act as a surface between the here and the there,” I say to her over text, but when I thought on it some more, I realized I was wrong about that too.
We left the gallery and took a wander, and found our way to Clementine Keith-Roach and Christopher Page’s show at PPOW: a terracotta sculpture exhibit with broken legs holding basins, the touching feet of a half torso under a wishing well, a fireplace of hands holding the hands of hands, the theme of a hand squeezing a breast. In the back room a bowl held up by torsos and hands squeezing breasts, was filled with GUESS WHAT, a non-liquid version of milk.
“There’s going to be milk in there,” said Olive, and I held her up to see inside, “you know how I know?” Kids are sharp: she saw the breast and the squeeze and the bowl and had its number. “It’s really only glue,” she said of the bowl filled with solid white lacquer. “Dried glue,” she was sure. When I looked inside I saw a bowl painted half white filled with clear liquid, which to me represents the contrast between how she was mothered and how I was mothered and I will be grateful every day for all the support I had to do it differently. But still my vessel is empty of compassion.
Another theme, of repeated coins on the top of a bench, held up by arms and legs, echoed the wishing well and, just now, I see that together they built an imaginary place between them, a kind of garden of contemplation. Then there were mirrors that were not mirrors but were gray paintings, with frames that looked wooden and raised but was also just brown paint. Thematically, surfaces were questioned and bodies were part-absent and broken and still so beautiful, still trying to hold on - to dream, to reflect, to wish in the absence of being whole or seen, by even themselves.
In another gallery across the way, a room of purple floors and purple walls held a table of Jolie Ngo’s “fairy houses,” as described by O, or described by me as pinched shapes the size of a shoe, with pastel colored glaze, that sat beside a gallery of Hun Chung Lee’s marshmallow shaped chairs with dripping chocolate glaze and oversized lamps hung from the ceiling in clumps. Downstairs, Serban Ionescu’s strange cut out and life size animal shapes delighted Olive and I snuck in to take her photo, which broke her trance. Still, she looked at the frog shape with its glowing eyes as if to ask it:
“Are you real?”
“Hello,” Olive says she heard the sculpture say to her…
“I literally heard it say that,” she says to me now, as I read this aloud. She’s climbing on me, rolling on me, putting her finger in my ear. “I hate that,” I say, and she laughs.
At the time I felt inspired by the reminder of how big and clumsy and messy art, is such an easy path to our child-like nature and wild imaginations and that I should use this pathway more often. I thought about Olive’s body language as she bounded up the stairs: muscular, heavy, brooding but not without her trade-mark bounce. For a long time, she skipped everywhere, with a double-hop of the right foot: bam ba-bam. bam ba-bam, the sound of it on the floor.