SOFA NEW YORK 2005: FOREVER, NEVER AND NOW

By Michael Workman

Olga de Amaral ESTELAS, installation view Linen, gesso, gold and silver leaf Bellas Artes/Thea Burger and the Museum of Art and Design

New friends, old allies and an unceasing flow of curious lookers, serious collectors and all kinds in-between animate this year’s installment of SOFA NEW YORK. It’s a good looking show and well-attended, by any consensus. Again at the Seventh Regiment Armory here on Park Avenue and 67th Street, glass glistens and gallerists beam. Examples of every assorted material are in evidence: clay, steel, fiber. What makes it so exciting is the ability of anyone to wander these aisles and find something to their liking: an object, an embodied idea. Something to make their home more beautiful, their leisure time reflection more illuminating, their experience of art steeped in a finer degree of things that are well-made and that surprise, mesmerize, tantalize.

Beth Cavener Stichter Strange Attraction Stoneware with porcelain slip Garth Clark Gallery

New this year we have a number of New York’s own contemporary galleries, including Dean Project, whose focus includes work from emerging artists, with glass, ceramics and furniture, the Danish Galerie Grønlund with “Nineties generation” glass and Tokyo Art Projects/Mika Gallery, with moving images, photography, ceramics and sculpture. Returning are such long-time staples of SOFA NEW YORK as Heller Gallery with their sculptural glass, often scientific and vaguely extraterrestrial in appearance, and Garth Clark Gallery, whose magnificent stable includes such work as Beth Cavener Stichter’s “Strange Attraction,” a menacing bunny rabbit of stoneware with porcelain slip, straight out of a darker version of Wonderland.

Ludwika Ogorzelec Sculpture #1, 2005 Wood, stone 38" x 35" x 31" Nancy Margolis Gallery

Touring the floor reveals a range of spectacular finds in an environment whose excitement prove difficult to match. Patrons of all backgrounds wander in and out the aisles, many in the newest fashions of the season amongst soldiers from the regiment in their camo uniforms and polished black boots, an appropriate social cross-sampling of the times. Why have they come? Work, play, serious appreciation. Investment in art, a sign of how little matters the money against the relative value of the art on display. If we highlight a few pieces from a few galleries, it may further help to contextualize the sheer influence of such works on those who seek them out, on the homes they make, their collections, on the art of our moment. At Nancy Margolis Gallery, for instance, we find Ludwika Ogorzelec’s “Sculpture #1,” a wood and stone planetoid floating in space, hundreds of short wood pieces assembled in grids upon grids. At its base a stone lays wedged in the grip of these wooden pieces, marking an imaginary center of gravity both for this uninhabited woodsy world and the object’s actual place in the world above which it hangs.

Temple Wall Hanging Korean, early 20th c. Silk-wrapped wall decoration Lea Sneider

Cybele Young We Haven’t Been There Before Japanese paper Bentley Projects

At Bentley Projects, a series of miniatures in recessed frames include Cybele Young’s Japanese paper piece, “We Haven’t Been There Before,” derived from origami but more complete somehow, fully colored and evocative of a frozen almost cinematic moment. Perhaps an exploding moment in the visual imagination, her baby stroller floating between pot and lid, a mini-satire that calls to mind Jonathan Swift’s 18th-century essay “A Modest Proposal,” in which the author suggests the public save money by boiling and eating the children of the poor. Darkly comical, Young’s piece spares the viewer no anxiety, though its miniature scale introduces a breath of humor to an otherwise scarifying ideal. At Lea Sneider, our actual ideals are represented in the religious artifact of a Korean temple; on the back wall hangs an example of an early 20th century silk-wrapped “Temple Wall Hanging,” a piece purchased, as Sneider herself tells us, by the Director of the Museum of Arts & Design.

Marian Bijlenga Untitled (green perspective) Horse hair and paper yarn Gallery Materia/Cervini Haas Gallery

Ruth Duckworth Untitled Archival Inventory # 8581004 Porcelain Wall Mural 20 x 20.5 x 5.5" Bellas Artes/Thea Burger

Moving into the realm of fiber abstraction, at Gallery Materia/Cervini Haas Gallery we find Marian Bijlenga’s “Untitled (green perspective),” made of horse hair and paper yarn, a delicate assemblage that visually evokes the sight over water of islands adrift in still seas, or perhaps lillypads in a Manet scene or even a martian landscape. It’s a credit to the interminable interpretive range of this fiber installation that we can find no resolution to its representative quality, since it exists thoroughly in the artist’s own conception of a place, time, a scene only revealed here. Similarly, we find in the wall-hangings of Ruth Duckworth, an artist who hails from the SOFA headquarter-city of Chicago, artifacts of another never-existing place, an Atlantis of science fictional purpose: her porcelain “Untitled #8581004,” for example, resembles a piece in a museum storeroom register. But of what place, of what purpose this enigmatically aerodynamic shape? It simultaneously recalls the waves of a far-off body of water, out the center from which rises a lightless orb—a porcelain sun. Having escaped from the Nazis during her youth, Duckworth eventually made her home in Chicago, and the University of Chicago Midway Studios, where she makes work that recalls a lost home—possibly even a better place than that of her own scarred memory.

Dante Marioni Vessel Display #15 Blown glass Marx-Saunders Gallery

Imaginary places can be viewed at this show alongside works of very real tradition. Case in point: at Marx-Saunders Gallery, we find Dante Marioni’s wall-hung blown-glass “Vessel Display #15,” filled with examples of geometric phials, decanters and cruets affixed with black geometric and organic elements in black. In a text by Artforum Magazine’s James Yood, Marioni’s attributed with evoking “the mists of Murano,” where glassblowers from Venice have worked since the late 13th century. In Marioni’s work, we indeed find the curlicues and flourishes that mark the inventiveness and skill of centuries refined experience with glass-making.

WEISSPOLLACK's booth at SOFA NEW YORK 2005.

Viewers can find a playful counterpoint to these venerable works at this year’s show as well. Youngest in feel and zeal, WEISSPOLLACK has transformed their booth into a sort of clothes-closet of works, from panties, coffee mugs and ball caps to one-word propaganda posters (“Dictator” announces one; “Never Contract” we are instructed by another). In a narrow niche alongside an inner wall of the booth plays a video of what viewers have spontaneously come to refer to as the “red dot lady” movie. It’s called “Virus,” by an artist named Liuba, and depicts a woman wearing a dress covered with red dots. She wanders a show very like SOFA, in and out of the aisles, trailed by a photographer snapping shots of her standing alongside the works, as if she herself were part of their exhibition. Then, peeling a dot off her dress, she places it on the wall next to each piece. Sold? Video of the gallerists gives us their reactions, from wonder to bemused consternation. She has owned the works herself, merely by juxtaposition of life with living art. It’s perhaps as good a metaphor as any for the experience of this year’s SOFA NEW YORK, a show that concludes with all the enthusiasm for return to a creative core that no art-loving New Yorker in good conscience could miss.

Michael Workman is a writer and editor living in Chicago, IL.