New York is New York is New York. Or so you’d think. At the newly expanded — yes, it’s now New York–sized — Bernard Toale Gallery in the South End, some curatorial gold mining has produced one luminous nugget of a show. In the 1990s, artist Joe Amrhein played pioneer by opening a maverick commercial art gallery in the (then) decidedly unfashionable Polish neighborhood of the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. He called his space Pierogi 2000 — starchy Polish dumpling meets lean future. Over the past decade, Boston’s Toale Gallery has showcased several of the Pierogi artists at its former Newbury Street digs. This time Amrhein has been invited to put forward a sampling of his artistic stable. The result: New York is Harrison Avenue.
Even more than a solo exhibit, a group show depends on two elements: the quality of the individual works and their overall integration. "Pierogi Presents" shines in both categories. The artists are eminently accomplished (credentials abound) and delightfully diverse, and the exhibit skims over nobody. Of the 14 included in the show, nine weigh in with two or more (hefty and representational) works. But what’s remarkable is that the five others, each of whom contributes a solitary artwork, register as if they too were being seen in depth. Patrick Jacobs’s tiny, untitled diorama — six inches tall and planted into a wall like a miniature, built-in aquarium — feels like an entire ecosystem. Dan Devine’s giant, ceiling-suspended skirt of crystals and wires and miniature surveillance devices could be an exhibit unto itself. Joe Amrhein’s Positive/Negative consists of two sets of multiple glass shelves. Lit from above, the words stenciled onto the shelves cast a legible, interlocking network of multi-leveled, language-drenched shadows. The only artist whose contribution would really have to be called solitary — Jonathan Herder’s Falling Branch, a thin, horizontal landscape reminiscent of Tuscany and fashioned out of tiny fragments of postage stamps — also feels satisfying. Amrhein and Toale know what they’re doing.
The real kick to "Pierogi Presents," however, isn’t attributable to its astute balance; it’s due to the accomplishments of some quirky, frequently obsessed, and surprisingly unselfconscious artists whose appeal lies in their ability to make a viewer, even a skeptical viewer, become involved with and then absorbed by their private passions. With his exquisitely articulated, abstract drawings, Dan Zeller makes networks of minuscule lines read like the most precise, true-to-life, aerial maps. And they’re make-believe. In Isolated Output, a fine, feathery spread of wispy graphite markings almost two feet square suggests a satellite image of an orange grove; the composite seems both far away and infinitely exact. Wherever the tiny rows of typically vertical marks get interrupted — randomly shaped white spaces open up here and there, as will an occasional horizontal suture — you imagine you’re looking down at a lake or a logging road.
Zeller’s achievement depends in part on the intimacy he creates; though his drawings aren’t small (the most diminutive measures in at over a foot square), they require your close proximity and recurrent scrutiny. In his two other contributions to the show he works in ink, and for all I know, in those frames he never lifts the laser-thin point of his pen from the paper until he’s through. They deliver that kind of mesmerizing continuity: mazes no bigger than a postage stamp contain a thousand complementary curves. But once you’re close enough, you discover small outposts of color — a yellow pond, a red mole. The intense exactitude as it combines with the works’ ethereal abstractness made me wonder whether he hasn’t been reading a lot of Beckett lately. Both artists mine drama from the sound of the wind.
Thrilling in an opposite though no less compulsive way are the oversized, expressionistic drawings of Dawn Clements. Oval is a gigantic, undulating, wall-mounted circular skirt that represents years of the artist’s pen and gouache drawings. The individual components that make up the skirt look as if they’d been done on traditional 8.5-by-11-inch paper. The sketchpad pages have been affixed, not quite seamlessly, to a molded canvas in the shape of a huge sting ray (sans tail). The conjoined units, all densely populated by roughly drawn male and female figures, are in turn surrounded by an ocean of handwritten words.
I had it explained to me that the men and women in this mad drawing are characters from the soap operas Clements watches; the words, too, derive from those broadcasts. And perhaps it’s Oval’s monumental scale as it combines with the banal, quotidian stuff of its begetting that explains why it reminds me of the figure-riddled windows you see in the walls of European cathedrals. Those aren’t saints you’re looking at, they’re the Medici.
More satisfying to me — better drawn, humbler, but also fiercely energetic and actually more personal — is Clements’s other drawing, a towering piece (14 feet high, over two feet wide) that depicts the insides and the outsides of her kitchen cabinets. Oval does little to suggest her technical prowess; Shelves does nothing to suggest anything except her mastery. In fact, it’s still hard for me to believe they’re by the same artist. What they do share is perspective: the farther you move away from each, the less chaotic and more balanced it becomes. It’s as if Clements were saying that the only trustworthy knowledge comes from stepping away.
Also riveting in "Pierogi Presents" are the enamel paintings of Steven Charles, which call to mind molten circuit boards, and the two large pencil drawings of John O’Connor, which enjoy an analogous command of composition and color. Robert Lazzarini’s two cigarette packs — stretched on their diagonals to look as if they were accommodating force fields in another universe — could substitute for bayonets, they’ve been made that dagger-like and sharp. Outstanding works by Kim Jones, You Si, Ati Maier, Yun-Fei Ji, and John Nobell complete the show.
PHOTOGRAPHER FRANK NOELKER’S association with primatologist Jane Goodall led him to a center outside Montreal where chimpanzees who are being used for medical research (or for the entertainment industry, or who’ll become illegal pets) are housed and cared for. Sometimes they even manage to reproduce. Noelker’s recent excursions to the center are the basis of the current "Portraits" at Howard Yezerski Gallery. It’s traditional portraiture, with about a dozen large (28 inches square) color prints of adult chimps — many gray in the muzzle, just as many mottled by depigmentation — and one image of a youngster born at the center. It’s a difficult, amazing show; you’re challenged to admit to their pathos, their personality, their kinship. Noelker’s technique is simple and self-effacing; he’s interested in his subjects more than he is in his interpretation of them. That alone makes "Portraits" almost unprecedented.
FINALLY, AT ACME FINE ART, a show of Robert Preusser (1919-1992) should not be missed. Preusser was something of a prodigy; when he was a teenager, his work was being exhibited nationally and internationally. You can see why. The vibrancy and the innovation of his watercolors — gardens and cities tumultuously join ranks — remain powerful; even his experimental ventures in Cubism and Expressionism feel freshly reinvented. Preusser left his native Texas to teach at MIT in 1954; he stayed for 30 years. But the show’s not about nostalgia; it’s about energy.
