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Surprises abound at Taos Abstract Artist Collective’s Fall Exhibition
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The Taos Abstract Artist Collective (TAAC) produces two massive group shows each year. I went to the spring one and was so impressed that I knew I would want to review the one this fall, which opens on Nov. 1.
Unfortunately, since the show is only up for nine days, I had to review it based on catalog images alone, which is not a practice I generally condone. Had I waited until after the opening, my review would not have come out in time for readers who don’t live in Taos to make plans to see it — and it’s definitely worth seeing.
TAAC’s fourth annual Fall Exhibition includes over 70 artists working in media ranging from painting and sculpture to collaborations with artificial intelligence. The organizers — wisely — have made no attempt to define abstraction, nor do they impose any overarching framework onto the art, which they leave essentially uncurated. I love shows like this because they empower us, as viewers, to wander around as we please and engage with the art directly.
In Jacqueline Mallegni’s “Tide Marks,” a corrugated fragment — of what, we don’t know — hangs from a mulberry branch like a flattened chrysalis. Made from naturally-dyed, handmade flax paper, it looks like something from the natural world one might stumble across on a hike. Yet the corrugation stamps a definitive post-industrial context onto this wonderfully poetic object, leaving us to ponder the nature of nature today.
Maximo Gonzalez-Menchaca’s “Pure Feelings #1” depicts a cool, dusky cityscape viewed from an airplane or the top of a mountain, but the darkening sky is abuzz with interlaced angular clouds and squiggly eye-floaters. These half-hallucinated shapes are rendered with the spare restraint of Alex Katz’s late-period gestural landscapes. Yet they convey as much hyperactive intensity as Jackson Pollock’s pre-drip psychoanalytic paintings, expertly expressing what Gonzalez-Menchaca identifies as states of “discomfort, unease and frustration.” The artist has such a mature command of his visual language, not to mention human emotions, that it’s hard to believe he’s still a junior at the New Mexico School for the Arts high school. If he’s this good now, I can’t wait to see where his art takes him in the years ahead.
Mark Reynolds is a painter’s painter. His “Free Falling Divisions” is a dynamic composition of interlocking shapes, which have only arrived at their present configuration, it seems, after hard-fought battles — and many layers of paint. The multiple colors peeking out from the edges of his shapes are evidence of drawn-out power struggles — one shape encroaching upon another, which then responds by reestablishing a border, and so on. It’s a familiar drama seen in the work of other intuitive painters, from Richard Diebenkorn to Thomas Nozkowski, and which will excite anyone who regards paintings not merely as images but as arenas of action, played out over time.
Nancy Kirk, meanwhile, subverts a Franz Kline-style work of gestural abstraction with a witty graphic design element worthy of Michael Bierut. Her particular combination of painterly abstraction and design is clever and engaging.
Ron Lopez says, “I hope people will enjoy my work and not try to figure it out.” Indeed, his wooden sculpture seems purpose-built to defy our interpretive powers. Part chair, part dog, part artist’s easel perhaps, his clattering Kurt Schwitters-esque assemblage is as fun as it is illogical.
Everyone, I imagine, inherits both good and bad things from their parents, including old traumas, which are often passed down in families. Monika Guerra’s “What Goes through the Mother Is Felt in the Child” presents this universal truth of intergenerational transference through the language of geometric abstraction, with just enough iconographic ambiguity to allow for multiple interpretations. The blue perspective lines in the background may suggest architectural renderings, but also spiderwebs — frequent symbols of motherhood and fate.
There are some very good textile artists in the show, too. Leigh Oviatt is a fiber artist who builds up thick textures reminiscent of corals and sea anemones, while Layne Jackson is a weaver with an op art sensibility akin to Samantha Bittman’s. Both are outstanding from a pure craft perspective, and their work exudes remarkable joy, considering how much work it must take.
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Violet Moon Tower’s collaboration with an AI program is one of the most original I’ve seen. Whereas most visual applications of AI are figurative and center on world-building, Moon Tower has produced a work of post-minimalist abstraction that’s surprisingly tactile, with ornate, thatched patterns reminiscent of hair braids, interspersed with smooth malachite buttons and a mysterious fuzzy substance that could be the remnants of expanding foam. Exploring materiality within the realm of virtuality, as Moon Tower does, opens new possibilities for the future of abstraction.
Abby Richardson and Rocío Rodríguez are both sculptors who were trained as architects, and both use sculpture to express the soft, vulnerable, human qualities that architecture, generally speaking, is too perfect and exacting to accommodate. Whereas buildings must stand up, sculptures can slump and slouch like real people. Richardson’s triangular pyramids, of which she’s made hundreds, may start as architectonic forms, but they quickly buckle under their own weight. They bear the marks of the artist’s hands, as well, which makes them all the more human.
Rodríguez’s textured sculptures often reference human skin and hair. In this exhibition, a small coil of black-painted canvas, wrapped around a nail, invites us to approach closely — more closely than we would normally get, either to a work of art or to another person’s hair, unless it’s a loved one whose hair we’re braiding. The sculpture, then, creates a feeling of intimacy far exceeding what might be expected from a small coil of painted canvas.
A cluster of golden eggs hangs from a chain in Marianne Hall’s “Everything She Touches.” The eggs are reminiscent of those bulbous forms seen in the fertility-themed Artemis sculptures of ancient Ephesus. Like Rodríguez and Richardson, Hall melds sculptural ideas of weight, balance, tethering and fragility with the subjective sensory experiences of female embodiment, which she communicates entirely through abstraction.
A hazy orange painting, speckled with dark streaks and dots, is beautifully spare. Julia Takahashi uses a variety of media, from spray paint to powdered pigment, to create her atmospheric marks, which reflect the Japanese concept of yúgen, a kind of beauty suggested through absence. “Understanding comes from winnowing out what is not depicted,” Takahashi writes in her statement. In this case, the artist is thinking about the loss of her dog, who was also her hiking companion. Both the spirit of the dog and the profundity of the loss are communicated better through these specks of swirling dust than by any literal depiction she could have made.
Well, those were the artworks that jumped out at me from the catalog, representing a panoply of approaches to abstraction. When I visit the show in person, perhaps I’ll find other works equally compelling. With big group shows like these, there’s always the possibility of big surprises, which is part of the allure. In any case, I’m confident it’ll be worth the two-and-a-half-hour drive to find out.
Logan Royce Beitmen is an arts writer for the Albuquerque Journal. He covers music, visual arts, books and more. You can reach him at lbeitmen@abqjournal.com.
