10/2024: “Bumper Crop” featured in Two Coats of Paint

A garden grows – on AstroTurf – in Gowanus

October 4, 2024 2:41 pm

*The Kentile sign in Gowanus, gone but not forgotten*

Contributed by Michael Brennan / On about 200 square feet of AstroTurf, artist-run Field of Play, which opened in 2022 in Gowanus, is a tiny gallery with big ambitions, staging adventurous exhibitions and offering health and wellness programs aimed at creative people and enterprises. “Bumper Crop,” curated by artist and gallery founder Matt Logsdon, includes work by artists carrie R, Estefania Velez Rodriguez, and Rachel Yanku. Timed to coincide with the autumnal equinox, she show’s theme is the garden – an intriguingly ironic premise, given that the gallery is located next to an EPA Superfund site, the Gowanus Canal.

*Rachel Yanku, Plumb, 2024, acrylic on wood, 84 x 5.5 x 10 inches*

Yanku’s sculptures, assembled mostly from end cuts of scrap lumber, fence the notional garden. I was quite taken with Plumb, which, standing at seven feet from foot to ceiling, presides over the patch with the practical gravity of a plumb line and the silent majesty of a sentinel. Here the curator juxtaposes the sculpture’s height with the space’s small footprint to emphasize vertical reach. Overhead, carrie R’s fine suture neatly and menacingly straddles a corner, suspended like a spindly-legged banana spider.

carrie R, suture, 2024, wire, aqua-resin, pigment, oil color, 6.5 x 4.75 x 6 inches

*carrie R, splaying outer body, 2024, wire, aqua-resin, aqua-glass, pigment, oil color, 61 x 26 x 8 inches*

All three of carrie R’s sculptures have pigmented surfaces, dense and abraded like an Elizabeth Murray painting. Their impacted color lends the work a pronounced tactile quality and a kind of warm alien glow. My mind kept wandering back to John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids, a classic science-fiction novel, later made into a film, about ambulatory killer plants.

*Elizabeth Murray, Terrifying Terrain, 1989–90, oil on shaped canvases, dimensions variable. Metropolitan Museum of Art.*

*John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids, 1951*

Estefania Velez Rodriguez has three paintings in the show. My favorite is Untitled (red and orange plants) which has an irrepressibly childlike charm that belies the piece’s painterly sophistication and inventiveness. Spray paint is the foundation, the opening move, of much contemporary painting. Velez Rodriguez expands its aesthetic utility, using what has become a stock material to scintillating effect by spraying hot color onto slick, irregular white vacancies to render budding flowers – or what Gertrude Stein might call tender buttons.

*Estefania Velez Rodriguez, Untitled (red and orange plants), 2024, oil paint, spray medium, on canvas*

“Bumper Crop” is a worthy trifecta, featuring three nuanced artists who seem to pass the ball four times before taking their shot.

“Bumper Crop,” Field of Play, 56 2nd Avenue, Brooklyn, NY. Curated by Matt Logsdon. Artists: carrie R, Estefania Velez Rodriguez, Rachel Yanku. Through October 13, 2024.

About the author: Michael Brennan is a Brooklyn-based abstract painter who writes on painting.