Text: Alec Coiro
Images Courtesy of Overduin & Co.
The theme is leisure at the latest show at Overduin and Co. The group of artists touch on leisure’s signifiers and the social structure that facilitates it.
The show resides in a bright white space, large enough for each artist’s piece to feel like a discreet installation. The 1949 film Puce by the legendary Kenneth Anger (which is literally projected from a film projector, I would like to note), sets the tone the most explicitly with a study of flapper era insouciance and hedonism. Two Jack Smith drawings are included and take things even further back in time — all the way to middle ages in one of his drawings of a saucy knight in formal attire. The other drawing goes further afield than American flappery to North Africa, where a man in a brilliant blue robe is at his leisure with his hookah.
Fresh from her success at the Whitney, Susan Cianciolo has assembled a cacophony of Run furnishings. The assemblage is a magnificent example of the many media in which Cianciolo works formed into a single, unified entity, which simultaneously integrates wonderfully as a part of the show. Perhaps the most akin to Cianciolo would be Rosalind Nashashibi, who seems to elevates fashion sketching to the level of art; however, closer inspection reveals that these are not sketches at all, and are instead a fascinating process by which ink-soaked clothing is run through a printing press, creating an effect that is ghostly and gorgeous.
Annabeth Marks adds a 3rd dimension to the two-dimensional clothing prints of Nashashibi with her deconstructed, sculptural garments that are painted on in such a way to create a very satisfying pairing with her paintings that hang next to them. Other painters in the show include Birgit Megerle, whose oil paintings of cocktails evokes the show’s theme quite explicitly, as does Shimon Minamikawa’s painting of playing cards.
All told, leisure is examined and critiqued from several angles, some more explicit than others. One things for certain, though, a trip to the Hollywood gallery would be very direct experience of leisure.
