Brooklyn Fire Proof News
The New York Times: In the Galleries, A Grand Finale of Group Show Fireworks (review)
posted July 18, 2003
“In the Galleries, A Grand Finale of Group Show Fireworks”
Roberta Smith
The New York Times
Friday, July 18, 2003
excerpt:
Brooklyn Fire Proof
Kathy Grayson, a young artist with a day job at Deitch Projects, has organized “Dirt Wizard,” a show of drawings, paintings and wall paintings by her contemporaries that is extremely ambitious, given the circumstances. These consist of Brooklyn Fire Proof, a hardscrabble gallery near the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway on Richardson Street (branches eastward off North 11th Street), but metaphorically the fine lines and hatched textures of Mr. Banhart’s drawings at Canada lead directly to “Dirt Wizard.”
This revelatory show reflects the intricate drawing styles with non-Western attributes of young artists on both the East and West Coasts. Evidence includes the extraordinary work of the self-taught artist Keegan McHargue, who, like Mr. Banhart, is from San Francisco (and made an impressive debut at Rivington Arms this spring) and Matt Leines, a recent graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design.
All three artists excel at fine lines, delicate patterns and an incipient fierceness that evokes the art of Northwest American Indians, Australian aborigines and the Hairy Who to varying degress, while being very much their own. Other negotiations between Eastern adn Western cultures can be seen in the wall paintings of Maya Hayuk, Justin Samson and Xylor Jane, whose big orange and pink wall piece distributes Mel Bochner counting systems within a tantric composition. Chris Johansen and Phil Frost are present as well, almost as elder statesman.