In Review roundup: Three shows to see before they close

David Kappy

Bingo Gallery

David Kappy is not the first artist to use Venetian blinds. Korean artist Haegue Yang has been using blinds since 2006, with major installations at the Guggenheim Museum (2009), Art Basel (2014) and the Tate Modern (2024). The New York City-based artist Kate Rusek, who was a guest on my video podcast, “Work in Progress,” last month, uses blinds, too, although she chops and reconfigures them beyond recognition in her “Fungal Emergence” works.

How Kappy uses blinds is unlike anything I’ve seen from Yang or Rusek, though. If sculptors can use steel, clay and glass without being compared to one another, why not blinds? Granted, the ubiquitous window coverings have less plasticity than those materials, and it’s harder to shed their association with generic office buildings. Yet, untapped potential exists, and I believe Kappy has hit on something truly new.

The method is deceptively simple: cutting and removing parts of the slats to make geometric patterns. In his exhibition at Bingo Gallery, “A Blanket without Warmth,” this simplicity yields incredible results. The approach is akin to basketry or textile art — hence the reference to blankets – but it’s more like un-weaving or anti-weaving than weaving. It’s creation by way of removal.

What’s astonishing are not the cut blinds themselves but the shadows they cast, which create abstract animated patterns as you move your head up and down or walk through the space. Granted, some pieces are more astonishing than others, but that’s because this is experimental art in the truest sense of the word. Kappy treats Bingo Gallery as a project space for trying variations in pattern-making, as well as installing and lighting the work at varying distances from the wall.

I suspect the artist will have another show in a year or two after all the kinks are worked out and his lighting effects are perfectly optimized, and it will be great. However, it’s almost more exhilarating to encounter the work when it’s still a bit raw. It’s like visiting Andy Warhol in his studio before anyone had seen the soup cans and he was still painting them with peeling wrappers. What a privilege!

“A Blanket without Warmth” by Kappy runs through Wednesday at Bingo Gallery, 2112 Second St. SW. Special gallery hours for the last week of the show are noon to 5 p.m. Monday through Wednesday. For more information, follow @bingoabq on Instagram.

‘Larry Bell and Wes Mills’

Richard Levy Gallery

My dad used to take me to Quaker meetings sometimes when I was a kid. The meetings were held in a light-filled upper room in an old house. Everyone would make a circle of chairs, then sit for an hour staring at the carpet. If people felt “moved by the spirit” to speak, they could stand up and say something. Otherwise, nothing, just silence. I hated it the first few times we went, but then I got used to it. My dad took me to a local Zen rock garden, too, and the feeling was similar. “The fullness of emptiness,” he called it.

Everyone needs a fix of sacred stillness once in a while, even a guy like me with ADHD (attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder), who’s always on the go. Activity and sensation are great, but peace and tranquility are like a reset button, and sometimes I need that, too.

Larry Bell and Wes Mills’ two-person show at Richard Levy Gallery is as quiet and contemplative as it gets. Mills’ small, pale paintings with delicate pencil work almost disappear into the walls, and three of Bell’s small pedestal pieces are judiciously spaced across the gallery like rocks in a Zen garden.

When things are so pared down, every detail is heightened.

Bell’s “Untitled 15-inch Cube” (2023), which is made of rose-tinted glass with a titanium gradient, rests on a transparent pedestal in the back of the Richard Levy Gallery in Downtown Albuquerque. Like many of Bell’s sculptures, it alters your perception as you walk around it. Sometimes, you see your own reflection, sometimes your reflection disappears and the glass becomes opaque, and sometimes you see straight through to the wall.

True minimalist sculptures like Tony Smith’s “Die” (1962) are intentionally boring. Smith’s steel cube looks exactly the same from the front, back and sides. “What you see is what you see,” as a fellow minimalist, Frank Stella, put it, before Stella converted to maximalism. Yet, Bell’s cubes, though they may look minimal at a glance, are full of mysteries and surprises.

Mills is even less of a minimalist, although, again, it’s easy to mistake him for one at a distance. The small, square, mostly-white paintings from his “Drift Fences” series might bring to mind the white paintings of Robert Ryman or any number of other minimalist artists, when, in fact, they’re representational.

A drift fence is a low fence, common throughout the Southwest, designed to keep cattle from wandering off to warmer places during the winter. If you google “drift fences in winter,” you’ll see what they look like covered in snow, which is what Mills’ paintings are meant to represent. His fences are wrinkly pencil lines, and he fills the spaces between them with white paint, making the graphite seem slightly indented below the surface, like paint cracks.

Does knowing how these pieces are made detract from their magic? Part of me always wants to try to figure out how artists do what they do, and another part of me just wants to get the experience. This exhibition appeals to both impulses. If you want sacred stillness, it’s there. If you want to think, you can do that, too.

“Larry Bell and Wes Mills” runs through Saturday at Richard Levy Gallery, 514 Central Ave SW. Gallery hours are 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. and by appointment. For more information, visit levygallery.com.

‘Soundings’

516 Arts and Poeh Cultural Center

“Soundings” is an ambitious traveling exhibition about sound and listening, although calling it a “sound art” show is misleading. Spread across two venues — 516 Arts in Downtown Albuquerque and the Pueblo of Pojoaque’s Poeh Cultural Center in Santa Fe — most of the works in the show have a strong visual component. The exhibition also centers on Indigenous perspectives, and I believe it’s the first major sound-based art exhibition to do so.

If you’re a fan of Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Raven Chacon, and you were excited by his citywide performance “Tiguex” this past Saturday, you can see more of his works in “Soundings,” including a video installation and a monumental wall hanging of his composition, “American Ledger (No.1).” “American Ledger (No.1)” uses an unconventional notation system that allows for a multiplicity of musical interpretations. Rendered as an oversized wall hanging, it can also be read pictographically, with subtle allusions to Navajo and Spanish colonial iconography and what appears to be an urban skyline.

Logan MacDonald’s “Offerings” is an interactive sculptural installation featuring wax hands holding translucent, papery phonograph horns — or trumpet lilies? The work draws a connection between the two — sound as floral outgrowth, or nature as music. Visitors are invited to take, leave or rearrange natural harvest materials as offerings. A subtle, beautiful, mysterious piece.

Other works play with our sense of perception. In Tanya Lukin Linklater’s “We Wear One Another,” a movement-based performance is projected from above onto a plinth, creating a pleasantly off-kilter experience. Camille Georgeson-Usher’s multicolored beaded net practically disappears from a distance but shimmers with lapidary clarity up close.

Each work in the show is a world unto itself. While some sound-centric art can be a bit dry and academic, the pieces in “Soundings” are not. Many are autobiographical in some way, and many show a reverence for land and ecology. See it before it closes, and let the art take you on a journey.

“Soundings” runs through Saturday at two locations: 516 Arts, 516 Central Ave. SW, and Poeh Cultural Center, 78 Cities of Gold Road, Santa Fe. For more information, visit 516arts.org and poehcenter.org.

In Review roundup: Three shows to see before they close