Despite humans’ current persistence for an us-and-them mentality, there is an alternate belief that insists everything is related to everything else at some dimension of reality. So, we could look at these three shows completely within their own contexts or entertain the idea of inevitable connection.

“Ken Greenleaf” at Sarah Bouchard Gallery in Woolwich (through June 25) is, primarily anyway, about the physical manifestation and illusion of space, as well as implied movement within it. “Jessica Gandolf: Undertow” at Portland’s Speedwell Projects (through July 1) has to do with space container, specifically the body as shelter from the cacophonous currents of contemporary life. And “Sustenance” at the Portland Public Library’s Lewis Gallery (through July 15) addresses the nourishment and nurturing necessary to sustain both inward and outward spaces of our lives, meaning the microcosm of the body and the macrocosm of the planet.

Though most works at Sarah Bouchard are ostensibly two-dimensional paintings, it’s clear they arise out of Greenleaf’s sculptural concerns. He has been primarily a sculptor, after all, something made clear by the thread Bouchard traces through his career, from a small 1972 steel assemblage of interlocking planes (which inspired a sapele desk that will be limited to an edition of seven) to black-and-white paintings executed just last year.

One of sculpture’s chief concerns, of course, is always space – how it contains space, defines space or interacts with it. Here, Bouchard presents a more “traditional” sculpture (in that it is three-dimensional): “Riomath,” a steel-and-wood construction from 1990 from the body of work for which Greenleaf first garnered national praise. It exudes a formidable presence within space, both in how it affects our movement (forcing us to circulate around it), as well as through our perception of its weight, mass and materiality (its steel and wood stumps trigger other contemplations too: manmade vs. natural, juxtapositional discernment between material weights and degrees of solidity etc.).

But as we circle the gallery, we may become aware of an infinity of possibility – and enjoyment – in Greenleaf’s myriad meditations on space and movement using various materials, colors and dimensionalities. There’s no psychological or symbolic content per se (one of the cornerstones of pure abstraction), just pure inquiry – dare I say even adventure – into space for space’s sake.

Greenleaf conjures great depth in two dimensions simply by applying black gouache onto watercolor Fabriano paper, cutting it in various shapes and collaging it onto Shinzen card stock – “Untitled” (Black Collages 10, 11 and 13)” – or by combining charcoal drawing and collaged acrylic elements on paper.

He invokes movement within space by many means: Using shaped (mostly trapezoidal) black or white canvases and suspending other black or white shapes within them that suggest spinning, tilting and tumbling. Or using black charcoal shapes surrounded by vaporous white that they hover slightly above the surface. And Greenleaf’s “4-Polarity and “Lotus Blossom” – assemblies of blue, pink and yellow triangular and trapezoidal canvases, are gracefully balletic despite their angularity, appearing to leap off the wall in exuberant pirouettes and camel spins.

Take a good look at the construction of the shaped canvases, too. Greenleaf is such a craftsman that it’s practically impossible to detect seams where canvas wraps around sharp angles, something their thinness makes extra hard to accomplish, but that also enhances the sense of lithesome movement.

ORDER AND CHAOS

People familiar with Gandolf’s work of recent years will recognize a signature figural shape in many of her canvases: a naïvely limned torso wearing short pants. This form, combined with wild pop colors, hasn’t always pulled me into its orbit. I’m not usually meaningfully moved by what can appear (at least on the surface) graphic, as much figural pop art can.

“Taking Off” is a prime example. From the waist down, the torso seems submerged in blue water, while from the waist up it exists in yellowy-orange light. Concentric pink circles emanate out from the figure’s waist, simulating ripples. Its cheery palette and the graphic rendering, which point at a common experience of wading into water, just doesn’t go anywhere for me. It’s perfectly nice, but I don’t perceive much beyond its graphic, polychromatic pleasures.

Yet what Gandolf is painting – much more successfully in other works, some with torsos and some without – is a multiplicity of currents: of energy and heat, of tension, of air and water, of agitation and chaos. As she explains in her statement, she hadn’t used figuration for over a decade before 2020, a year in which we were suddenly thrust into a scary, unfamiliar world of pandemic panic, horrific racial violence, destabilizing economic uncertainty, and political antipathy and dysfunction.

The painting that most impactfully describes the prevailing assaultive swirl of malaise and confusion is “Crosscurrents.” It can be disorienting to look at, filled with whirling, ricocheting lines, discordant patterns and riotous color. But Gandolf achieves something – sans the torso – that is quite extraordinary: a melee that nevertheless reveals an underlying sense of order.

Despite the frenetic energy “Crosscurrents” emits, nothing smashes into anything else within this space. Rather, individually expressed currents glide over and under the patterns and colors lying in their paths. The implication for me was that at some more intelligent dimension of reality, there was reason to these rhythms, which expressed a purpose or step in our evolution as yet obscured to us.

This painting pivoted the way I saw the show. Suddenly the depth and complexity I was missing in “Taking Off” surfaced. Colors appeared a little too cheery in many paintings, almost shrill, adding to a sense of overwhelm and bombardment, especially – to my surprise – in canvases that included a body form, which suddenly felt vulnerable, as if striving to maintain the equilibrium of its interior space amid the chaos.

I felt the unease within the order even more, though, in Gandolf’s small, graphite-on-paper “Studio Series.” Here we see the way currents cast shadow and cause reverberation. Without the color to distract us, they are also masterful (Gandolf is an accomplished draftsperson). All of this points to the importance of retrospective surveys of an artist’s work. We see her facility with various mediums. But there are also earlier paintings here, such as “Spring Breeze” that do not deal with the troubled times that followed, revealing a lighter, more pattern-based impulse in Gandolf’s work. All of it becomes of a piece.

THOUGHT FOR FOOD

Artist Lin Lisberger and scholar-author Myron Beasley have curated a show ostensibly about food. But the interesting thing about “Sustenance” is that food is merely a way into thinking about larger ramifications of food in our lives – from our dependence upon it for survival to the insalubrious effects that can result from our pursuit of it.

Lisberger’s own skillfully sculpted works, literal in one way, are more about sculpture than food. “Loaded Hotdog” imagines this American staple in wood except for the squirt of mustard (a metal coil) and lettuce (rotary saw blades). She also offers a hamburger and a bagel sandwich. It’s their non-illusionistic integrity that is more interesting. Rather than Peter Anton’s sweets or Claes Oldenburg’s burgers and cakes, these retain their connection to carving, revealed in tool marks that cut and chiseled the images.

Some artists reference food gathering and harvesting (Mi’Kmaq artist Richard Silliboy’s impeccably crafted ash basket and Aminata Conteh’s metal basket-like sculpture). Others speak to food as comfort and a vehicle for community, most notably Rachel E. Church, who created a handmade book where recipes are printed on kitchen cloths. Each has a corresponding paper plate printed with the picture of the dish and/or the originator of the recipe. The work celebrates the way cooking brings people – particularly women – of a community together.

Environmental impacts manifest in various ways. Side X Side, an arts-integrated program in which a teaching artist collaborates with third-graders on art that responds to education about race, income, food insecurity and opportunity inequality, is one of my favorites. While studying river ecology and migratory salmon, artist Pamela Moulton and her charges made plates of food and schools of fish using recycled denim.

The loveliness of Jill Pelto’s watercolors are deceiving, something her titles clarify: “Salmon Population Decline,” “Overgrown” and “Habitat Degradation: Ocean Acidification.” Celeste Roberge’s seaweed-coated boots and swimsuit look eerily as if the ocean has claimed the bodies that once filled them. (The title of the boots is “Seaweed Will Be Lapping at Your Doorstep,” indicating the imminence of rising sea levels due to global warming.)

Other political issues appear in Daniel Minter’s “Bouquet for Fire,” in which a boat symbolizing the Atlantic Crossing and the human and economic costs of slavery and racism explodes with a crop of okra (a staple of Southern African-based cooking). Valerie Hegarty also comments on the crime of slavery with her picture of a decadent banquet being picked apart by crows in the dining room of Cane Acres Plantation in South Carolina. To the home’s 18th-century resident Thomas Cheverall, who sired three children with his mulatto slave (22 enslaved people farmed his crops), the work seems to say, “The party’s over.”

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