'Graphic T' by Allen Brewer & Audrey Gair at King’s Leap, New York

For Allen Brewer and Audrey Gair, painting is a form of dressing up. T-shirts are a frequent motif in both practices: Brewer’s use of tees as material, Gair's use of tees as icon-like symbols. An apt metaphor for both their work, shirts are not only objects that stretch to fill the body, but also an externalization of an individual’s identity. Wearing a graphic tee can be a deeply personal act that asks strangers to pay attention to who we are, and what we care about. All the while, a t-shirt covers the skin and hides one’s vulnerabilities. It can be understood that a t-shirt is a way of connecting and loading meaning into an otherwise empty subject. Brewer and Gair’s work, then, redefine relationships to body and form, and their paintings demand, like a tee might, to “speak to me.”

Allen Brewer utilizes ever-evolving strategies to play with material structures in his paintings, whether through lysergic cartoon psycho-dramas or iconoclastic material gestures. Frequently these two go hand in hand as in Time Currency. Here, Brewer’s use of colored pencils and charcoal imagines a studio where alien-like creatures writhe and twist among blank canvases. Brewer covers the painting in stickers and washes of gesso, making his forms bulge and glow as though they’re alive. In Time Currency and much of the work of Brewer, subjects become submissive agents toward their own materiality. The paintings of Brewer literally stretch the limits of the canvas: he often paints directly onto t-shirts and sweaters, folding against impossible bodies and covering objects like car rearview mirrors and plush chili-peppers. In Suicide, Allen cuts out the forms of severed heads kissing or talking, affixes them with glue to a worn down painting, and uses processes of frottage and acrylic application, all of which begin to mimic the look of bronze or metal. Brewer’s work is driven by suspended animation: paintings into objects, objects into subjects.

Where Brewer is interested in how to enliven his surfaces and objects, Audrey Gair creates non-spaces to activate her concerns. In a new 4-paneled painting entitled Genesis, Gair paints distinct backdrop grids, all in dim neon colors: some appear as brick, others more reminiscent of the pulse of a nightclub. These mostly empty spaces recall both screensavers and minimalist painting, where bubbles bump and prod in the foreground. In some panels, splats appear like lightning bugs smeared across car windows. The paintings on paper are hinged together by orthopedic casts adorned with the names of those from Gair’s past, giving the empty spaces a physical and personal ache. Gair frequently obfuscates her figures, like the avatar she returns to in her other paintings; a young woman, bootcut flared jeans, turned away from the viewer, sitting on a skyscraper looking out onto a grid. For this character, the grid becomes a city that’s at once open and closed, both a reality and an impossibility. Through these existential narratives, Gair’s work promises a vision beyond the limitation and uniformity of grids and frames, a window into the real world.