Last summer I traveled to Paris for an exhibition. My wife and her family came along and took us all to the Opera National de Paris at the Palais Garnier for a performance of Gluck’s Alceste directed by Olivier Py.(1) When we took our seats, I was surprised to see an immense drawing in chalk depicting the exterior of the Palais Garnier that stretched the height and width of the stage. Py’s frequent collaborator, Pierre-André Weitz, created the moveable sets out of flat, blackboard-like surfaces, which artists covered with drawings that they then erased and changed all while the performers acted and sang. The way these staging elements and theater technicians emerged from behind the curtain and simultaneously brought the facade of the opera house indoors, created a double narrative with the 18th century story.
When back in Brooklyn and while still thinking about those parallel narratives, I visited Rachel Frank’s studio where I saw two or three of her large animal masks stored on shelves. She created these as part of her on-going Rewilding Project, but seeing the masks in storage, they took on a potential energy suggestive of other narratives and contexts. They bring to mind species once far-ranging, hunted to near-extinction, conflicts between colonial power and indigenous peoples (as Rachel points out in a statement about the project)(2), and mythic human animal hybrids reminiscent of Goya’s prints and Greek myth. While inert, they double narratively as a vehicle for impromptu performance and finely wrought sculpture.
Angela Dufresne’s drawings offer a parallel universe to that of her paintings. Whereas her paintings give in-the-flesh views of her grand dames, beast-women, hornball heroes, ass-kickers, boot-lickers, and pissers, her small-scale drawings open expansive spaces where the many facets of her drama can play out at once. Movie theaters, Roman arches, and construction sites all serve as settings and each modifies her cast of characters’ behavior (or misbehavior). In the paintings the figures have the sculptural presence of a tableau vivant staged moments after the action has happened. When Dufresne draws, she captures the events as they occur. In one untitled drawing, Prince looks out from a movie screen, while the audience of revelers, including a multi-teated woman, several transgender individuals, and Nebuchadnezzar in beast form, all cavort. In another Gena Rowlands appears on the big screen in a crowded opera house/theater. If Rowlands in A Woman Under the Influence is Dufresne’s muse—a woman struggling to shake off patriarchy’s brutal, limiting definitions—then the theater is her ideal setting. Theatrics (and the immediacy of drawing) gives Dufresne the chance to test and break boundaries. Her theaters also bring together difference: performer and spectator; female and male; human and animal; and good and bad taste.
In recent years Katharina Ziemke has begun collaborating with theatrical productions, designing set elements and painting backdrops, but her work has always contained her distinct form of introverted drama. Often working from old photos and film stills, she creates scenes that have a flash-photo-meets-magic-lantern lighting. In her scratched wax drawing, Nocturnal Gathering, she depicts a campground setting that implies narrative possibilities. What could easily be a pastoral image of a weekend outing, takes on sinister implications because of Ziemke’s method of first applying bright colors and then covering them over with black wax. By scratching back through the wax she peels away the shadow to reveal the formerly hidden light. Just the same, the weight of the black wax gives the kaleidoscopic color a distant character like hearing the sounds of a good time echoing through the woods at night.

Opening Reception: June 28, 6:00 to 8:00pm

mpefm USA art press release