Review: William Powhida wryly eyes the business of art
By Holly Myers Thursday, April 25 2013
So rare
is good satire in contemporary art that its appearance - as in the newest
exhibition of William Powhida, a New York-based artist who is fast evolving
into one of its sharpest practitioners - makes one inclined to stand up and
applaud.
The
show, called "Bill by Bill," at Charlie James Gallery, combines the
motif that has become Powhida's trademark - the trompe l'oeil painting
of a sheet of paper covered in handwritten notes - with a series of artworks
conceived on the basis of unspoken but eminently recognizable formulas.
There's
"Informal Materialism" (a chunk of scrap wood and a sheet of
paint-stained canvas); "Asset Class Painting" (a trio of blurry,
colorful abstractions); "A Taxonomy of Forms on a Shelf" (a cube, a
sphere and other glazed ceramic objects lined up in a row); "A
Hypothetical Word or Phrase in Neon" (simplified, perhaps for ease of
fabrication, into an underscore or strike-through mark); and, what may be my
favorite, "A Taxidermied Animal in a Box," which is just what it
implies, complete with foam peanuts.
The
works themselves are not slapdash cracks but dutifully, even earnestly
constructed objects, largely indistinguishable from the classes of works that
they mock. At a glance, it all reads as your typical group show.
The
real pleasure lies in the trompe l'oeil notes that Powhida pairs with
each work, which detail the concept, process and cost involved in language
that playfully derides the absurdity of each of these tropes while
occasionally exposing the darker economic conditions underlying them.
Of
"DIY Informalism," a clumsy mélange of bent-up stretcher bars and
torn, paint-dripped canvas, Powhida writes: "Idea: To play around with
some studio junk and stuff from the hardware store to make a few awkward
objects
Of
"Post minimalism," a row of tall, slickly finished sculptural
columns based on economic statistics, he notes: "Idea: Have the
fabricator make some bar graphs into 'purely' formal objects. Then apply some
Kantian aesthetic logic and
What
saves the work from grating sarcasm or smart aleck cleverness - toward which
the artist has erred in the past - is a curious undertone of sincerity. Powhida
is not mean-spirited or bitter but seems genuinely driven to understand his
subject: the internal mechanisms of this peculiar social and economic
ecosystem. How does the art world work and how should we feel about that? How
much of ourselves should we reconcile to it?
He
clearly takes these questions seriously. If he didn't, his excoriation
wouldn't be nearly so funny.
Charlie James Gallery, 969 Chung
King Road, (213) 687-0844, through June 8. Closed Sunday through Tuesday. www.cjamesgallery.com
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