FOCUS: Fish and Dish—A Fresh Take on Still Life

Woodstock Artists Association & Museum | March 7 – TBA, 2020

The Woodstock Artists Association & Museum opened a new exhibition on March 7 titled FOCUS: Fish and Dish—A Fresh Take on Still Life, juried by Jason Andrew. I was fortunate to see this show at WAAM the week after it opened. Unfortunately the opening reception scheduled for Saturday, March 14 was cancelled due to the closure of the museum to prevent the spread of COVID-19. I was particularly interested in this exhibition because the juror Jason Andrew, an independent scholar, curator, and producer, is a legend of the Brooklyn art scene. He’s the co-founder and director of Norte Maar, a non-profit dedicated to encouraging, promoting, and presenting collaborative projects in the arts. Andrew is also a Founding Partner at Artist Estate Studio, LLC, an entity that advocates for the legacy of artists like Jack Tworkov and Elizabeth Murray.

Andrew has a great eye and I was curious to see what he selected for the show. I was happy to see work by Beacon artists Sascha Mallon and Rob Penner, as well as other familiar names. The show includes Fern Apfel, Joan Barker, Sascha Mallon, Jenny Nelson, Rob Penner, Herb Silander, Jeff Starr, Linda Stillman, Wendy Williams, and Mimi Young.

The exhibition’s starting point both physically and conceptually is a painting hung on a freestanding wall in the center of the gallery. The work is by De Hirsch Margules (1899-1965), a Romanian-born American abstract realist painter, and Andrew selected the painting from WAAM’s Permanent Collection. It portrays a typical still life table scene with a bowl of fruit; however, the left side is painted with bright warm colors, and the right side with dark cool colors. Perhaps Margules is showing us the same view during the day and at night. This enigmatic painting serves as the springboard for a fresh look at the still life genre, which became popular in seventeenth century Europe and has been revisited by numerous modern artistic movements from impressionism to cubism. As stated in WAAM’s introduction to the exhibition: “With a respectful nod to the past, Mr. Andrew will select work that expands upon, toys with, or stretches the idea of what makes a still life, a still life.”

What I enjoyed most about the exhibition is the departure from the typical still life genre and the variety of the work selected by Andrew. Rob Penner’s photographs of worn utilitarian objects on a stark white background are beautiful studies in form, but they also suggest a hidden narrative. His images leave the viewer wanting to know more about where the objects came from and whom they belonged to. Arranged throughout the gallery are Herb Silander’s small sculptures that combine pieces of wood, found objects, and household items into quirky abstract compositions.  Fern Apfel’s acrylic and pen on wood panel paintings of letters, notes, and diaries resemble eighteenth and nineteenth century trompe l’oeil paintings. They refer to memory, relationships, and time. For Apfel, her paintings “present life not as then versus now, but as an inescapable circle of time and memory.”

Linda Stillman’s work is a clever inclusion in the show. She makes drawings and collages using leaves, flowers, and other natural materials. On view in Fish and Dish are works from her series Nature Notes, collages composed of circles cut from leaves. The collages are literally “still lives,” as Stillman has captured natural materials at a moment in time, preserved them, and made them into art. Joan Barker’s environmental still life photographs are taken outdoors as a way of addressing the unpredictable and ephemeral nature of our lives and the instability of our time. She arranges objects and natural materials in or near a stream, and includes the running water and sometimes fire in her images. In addition, nocturnal animals such as a coyote pass in front of a trail camera positioned nearby, adding an element of chance and unpredictability as the natural world becomes “a stilled life.”  

Sascha Mallon’s installation features a circular wall painting that serves as a backdrop for an arrangement of ceramic pieces. The enigmatic scene includes a table, flowers, insects, and a dish with a dead fish on it. A yellow moon can be seen outside an open window. There are a few unsettling elements, including birds that appear to be sleeping or dead, and a trio of knives hanging on the wall. Mallon’s work refers to the cycle of life, and her ceramic sculptures serve as pictograms, carriers of hidden messages, and memento mori.

Abstraction is featured prominently in Fish and Dish, which is part of what makes the exhibition so interesting and unusual. Jeff Starr’s brightly colored drawings contain abstract geometric shapes intermingled with figurative elements such as human faces and animals inspired by images in magazines and catalogs. The accumulated imagery creates an incoherent narrative, a reference to the increase in our digital, social, and political confusion. Wendy Williams’ paintings also combine organic abstract forms with figures. She writes that her paintings are about seeking identity, the origins of memory, and questioning the meaning of home and the feeling of belonging that it represents.

Jenny Nelson’s paintings contain layers of color, shapes, and lines that appear as if the artist is drawing and erasing an object over time. Nelson views the painting process as a collaboration between herself and the materials. She writes: “The process of layering, adding and subtracting, creates a kind of history on the canvas. Shapes have a story to tell. Lines that have been obliterated and resurrected over and over again have an emotional charge.” This sense of memory and the passing of time are like a modern-day vanitas; a symbolic work of art showing the transience of life. In a similar way, the lines and shapes in Mimi Young’s acrylic and charcoal paintings are shorthand for her experiences and memories. The marks and layers in her work resemble a palimpsest. The constant thread in her work is change, and her process involves removing almost as much paint as she applies. She responds to political and environmental events that occur on a daily basis, as well as to the larger theme of aging, death, and renewal.

FOCUS: Fish and Dish—A Fresh Take on Still Life is a thoughtful and engaging exhibition that reinterprets what a still life can be. As I learned more about the work Jason Andrew selected for the show, a theme emerged, one that embodies the time and place in which we live. All the work in this exhibition, in one way or another, addresses history, memory, and/or mortality. These still lifes serve as reminders that there are cycles in life and that this current crises will eventually pass.

Additional images from the show can be found on WAAM’s website and on Instagram and Facebook. Information about the juror Jason Andrew can be found at Norte Maar and Artist Estate Studio as well as on Instagram @nortemaar.

There are currently two other notable exhibitions at WAAM: Eleni Smolen: Girl by the Sea/Guardians, March 7 – TBA, 2020 and Otto Bierhals: A German-American Artist in Woodstock, curated by Bruce Weber, February 1 – May 10, 2020.