The friendly and rustic Brown Triangle presents Carol Jackson, Karolina Gnatowski and John Almanza. While the show finds Ms. Jackson between major projects it still presents an excellent opportunity to view her work. Ms. Jackson brought a few collages, presumably studies for leather works, and drawings made from old sheet music cover art and song titles taken from epic poetry or real estate ads. In a rare treat guests are invited to flip through the stack without gloves, making the drawings less rarefied and more relatable. The nostalgic designs combine with alternately caustic or flowery wording to produce a biting look at culture. In a more playful vein, Karolina Gnatowksi’s sculpture “Bon Voyage” presents a stereotypical rowboat. The ship, made of stuffed fabric tubes with leg holes and suspenders, hung comically from the ceiling recalling cartoon barrel pants, yet other factors make it more tragic-comic. Aft, a broken papier-mâché champagne bottle lies on the ground transforming this boat into a bodiless metaphor. Christened, this shell of a boat awaits a viewer’s imagination. Finally, John Almanza’s abstract wooden pillars called to mind palm trees or hornets nests. Slicing down through the room the scimitar like sculptures only succeeded in engaging the severe architecture of the space but did so without a clear purpose. (Dan Gunn)
Through Feb 18 at Brown Triangle Gallery, 2214 W. 21st St.
Related Stories
Weather Patterns: A Review of John Santoro at McCormick Gallery Talking about the weather, as painter John Santoro notes, was once just a mundane space filler. Now, with more than a few “warmest year on record” behind us, the weather has become a significant concern.
Second Sets: A Review of John Sparagana at Soccer Club Club Sparagana subverts the static documentation of a time-based medium by imbuing the image with an infinite set of potentialities—his blurred images shimmer like specters of time and space ready to unfold.
