'Step Count', Group Show at Shoot the Lobster, New York

Every painting and sculpture has been picked up on foot. From the Lower East Side to Red Hook. 

The process of selecting work has been largely intuitive, following conversations and ongoing relationships with the artists involved. 

Oliver Clegg’s Lumière is part of the artist’s series of paintings based on Happy Meal toys. Clegg has rendered the character dutifully, though a certain peculiarity hangs over the work - something buoyant and incalculable which keeps the composition charged with vitality. 

Brittany Adeline King weaves her genealogy with ubiquitous forms and gestures. She employs the image archives of herself and her family members in order to uphold fragments of time under the lens of here and now. A faded baby photo is centered in the mass of paint and matter comprising Banana's Boat - with formal impressions decorating the largely red and mauve canvas. 

Chris Martin submits to the inner drive of his paintings, spawning rich chromatic displays of abstraction populated by his distinctive motifs. The painting on view carries his legacy of glittery saturation and textural brushstrokes which culminate in a seven pointed star. 

Louis Osmosis is a tactical artist, challenging his modified detritus by extending materials beyond the field of discard. Daycare is a boxed-in confluence of sticks comprising a tumbleweed and placed in the middle of the gallery floor. The work has potential to expand throughout the exhibition, with packages sent to Martos on a whim, carried over to STL, then situated in the room. 

Mimi Park’s previous bodies of work have traced her concern for the connective tissue between ideas and people, made explicit through her cultivated environment at Lubov earlier this year. For Step Count we see her ideas condensed onto the picture plane, with figures decorating her specific ecosystem. 

Alison Peery’s massive Snorlax sits comfortably in the gallery’s corner, snoozing instead of manning the space. He’s fabricated with Peery’s signature textiles - her dealings with the pharmaceutical industrial complex are literally woven into the creature’s body. 

Will Sheldon’s cropped soft torso is decorated with a cool off the shoulder top and a cinched belt at the hips. Sheldon places specific emphasis on the skull and bones buckle which dominates the image’s lower half with its meticulous rendering of the shiny surface and light’s reflection. Esther Sibiude illustrations are like biomorphic landscapes, patterned with loose strands of colored pencil in soft pastel shades. They remain in a vibrant state of becoming, never quite settled into category or fixed within a narrative. 

Hannah Taurins materializes an array of unknowable, yet discerning women in colored pencils and paint. Spinning Out is pared down to a deeply chromatic pencil rendering of another femme character caught in an extreme act of contortion. The face is recognizable, though... Could that be Liza Minnelli? 

Dean Violante’s oversized illustration bears the traces of process. Pencil marks delineate forgone ideas, whereas the ink communicates a final resolution. The papers are joined together to a woven effect. 

Reading: Rebecca Solnit: Wanderlust: A History of Walking
Listening: Weird Studies, Episode 59: ”Green Mountains Are Always Walking”