Contemporary Realism
Juried by Jonathan Griffin
Curatorial Statement
What is true? What is real? What does the term ‘realism’ even mean in a time when many – if not most – of us suspect that there is no such thing as a shared reality, only individual, disparate realities that differ wildly depending on someone’s unique perspective? I may respect your reality, even if it is divergent from mine, maybe totally unrecognizable. (The endeavor to uphold this respect is, I’d argue, the fundamental challenge of our historical moment, even as the notion of a universal truth is embattled beyond repair.) But is it possible we find stable points of shared experience, constant fixtures that – at least to us – seem to us like the moorings of reality?
This exhibition, I hope, argues that yes, a small shared sense of realism can and does exist.
When viewing the hundreds of submitted artworks for Site:Brooklyn’s open call, I quickly established my own intuitive criteria for what ‘contemporary realism’ means to me. The first two-part question I asked myself was whether the work sent me out into the world, into somewhere that felt familiar, or – if not – then at least authentic, ‘real’? Or did it send me back into the studio, into the world of art materials supply stores, figure painting studios, and the smell of linseed oil and turpentine and dog-eared pages of art history books or contemporary art magazines?
Don’t get me wrong – I have love for both places – but for this assignment, it seemed important to understand ‘realism’ as work not just connected to but that actually reconstituted, conjured, a vivid sense of reality.
It was easier to establish what ‘contemporary realism’ should not include. There would be no fantasy, no romantic flights of fancy, no nostalgia and no overt, winking art historical references. There would be no Surrealism and – controversially, perhaps – no magical realism – which, these days, to me feels too magical, too cliched, and not enough real.
There would be no overt messaging, no clunky metaphor, no allegory, no pious moralizing. Reality just is – it is morally neutral, a background against which we construct our own meanings and value systems.
‘Contemporary realism’ also infers certain aesthetic qualities. I steered away from graphic stylization – the sanding off of the world’s inconvenient edges, its scars and blemishes. Photography lends itself to the democratic representation of imperfect reality, but in the age of ubiquitous image-manipulation software and A.I., it can also be made to seem more like painting or graphic art, and less like itself. Realism is not about simplification, but the acceptance of messiness. I reveled in works’ surprising details, in their embrace of the aberrant and the random.
Finally, to me, realism, as a genre, is not synonymous with illusionism; to be a realist is not necessarily to be realistic. Photorealist painting – which is in evidence in this exhibition, though not predominant – has, in the decades since its inception in the 1960s, adopted its own unrealistic cliches and visual tropes, from vintage cars to neon signage, which, today, have little to do with the reality I see around me, but everything to do with that narrow genre, which anyway was always more to do with the particularities of the photographic image than the ineffable sensation of the real world in which we live. Contemporary realism is ultimately more identifiable as a feeling than as a particular style or documentary ethos. – Jonathan Griffin
Wall 1: The Metropolis
Clara Nulty / Daniel Cook / Thomas Crawford / Kevin Bartlett / James Bryan / Karen Baker / Cassandra Chalfant / Lauren Davies / Brad Davis / Willa Hut / Barbara Johnson / Karen Rothman
Realism has long had a close affinity with the urban and suburban environment – not only because that is where so many of us live and work, but also because it somehow resists sentimental pictorialization, unlike, for instance, rural landscape. The city street is the ultimate example of a mutually shared reality against which thousands or millions of subjects occupy their own individual realities. Daniel Cook’s photograph Civil Inattention is a perfect representation of this condition. Other photographic artists, like Thomas Crawford, James Bryan or Karen Baker, suggest analogies between the heterogeneity of the built environment and the diversity of the people that dwell in it. This category is not reserved only for photographers, however; painters including Clara Nulty, Brad Davis, Cassandra Chalfant and Willa Hut convey, in terms from the illusionistic to the expressionistic, the contingent, instable and mutable realities of urban life.
Wall 2: Nature / Countryside / Beyond the city / The Rural / Out of Town
Kevin Bartlett / Cassandra Chalfant / Rebecca Clark / Shawn Digity / Gabe Fernandez / Vincent Hron / James Labeck / James McDonald / Marilyn Mitchell / Bruce Morrow / Marjorie Moskowitz / Will Rothfuss
City folk eager to reconnect with a sense of reality will often head out into nature – or maybe they never settled in town in the first place, preferring to ground themselves in places unspoiled by human settlement. Of course, at a molecular level, the country is no realer or more natural than the city, just as the notion of ‘landscape’ is an art-historical trope rather than a topographical reality. Some artists here, as with Cassandra Chalfant or Marilyn Mitchell, focus on this conception of nature as pictorial fantasy, their appropriated representations ironically coming off as realer than the fantasies themselves. Others, like Rebecca Clark or Marjorie Moskowitz, train their exacting gaze on expressions of the natural world, even if a weed or a flower bed is a fundamentally human construction.
Wall 3: Who we are
Janet Ballweg / Elizabeth Berdann / Leigh Brooklyn / Sena Creston / Susan DAmato / Steve Danielson / Rachel Davis / Jeanette Hammerstein / Arran Harvey / Ella Hepner / Karen Khan / Jen Maloney / Brian Paris / Norton Pease / Aaron Pickens / Christopher Smith
The presence of a human subject need not only be conjured through a conventional portrait. Nevertheless, there are many excellent examples of that genre here, with faces gazing intelligently out at the viewer, suggesting that they have their own thoughts about us just as we do about them. In other works, people are pictured absorbed in their own activities, not making eye contact but allowing themselves to be observed, either openly or covertly. In Sena Creston’s crushingly intimate photographs, we do not feel as if we’re spying, but are privileged to be present in these tender moments. In Arran Harvey’s paintings, by contrast, we seem to be invisible to the people depicted. Then there is another more ambiguous category of picture, in which human presence is implied through objects alone; not quite traditional still lives, paintings and prints by Jen Maloney, Janet Ballweg and Karen Khan summon potent presences even in the absence of human bodies.
![Janet Ballweg [Save] The Last Dance Screenprint 21" x 15" $700.00 ](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/55abdff2e4b08ed55aed55b8/1731447394544-Y7WB3USL2NWDX6GVA6OO/Ballweg_000006_816974_162819_14117.jpg)
Wall 4: Abstraction
Amber Byrne Mahoney / Robyn Cooper / Jen Maloney / Briar Craig / Kate Gordon / Armin Mersmann / Aaron Bernard
Abstract realism is, admittedly, the loosest category of work in this exhibition, and the hardest to define. By no means all the work here is abstract, in the conventional sense; Armin Mersmann’s exacting graphite drawings or Robyn Cooper’s carefully observed digital paintings both derive from things seen in the world. However, their effect is to separate what is seen from its usual meaning and associations. Reality becomes strange, abstract even, when viewed at close quarters. A screen-print by Briar Craig and microscope images by Amber Byrne Mahoney, on the other hand, may at first appear abstract, but later reveal themselves to be – in their own ways – residues swabbed directly from the fabric of the real world.
Photorealist painting – doesn’t actually look like reality, although it should be interested in looking like photography.
Photorealism, of course, has now inherited its own cliches, as – arguably – has realism itself. Photorealist pictures of vintage cars or street signage puts me immediately in mind of the 1970s scenes of Robert Bechtle or TK. Realist cliches, perhaps might include suburban domesticity, family life, solitary, moody introspection, gritty black and white, cut-price quotidian.
Bad when painting is obviously done from a photo but it seems to have no interest in the inherent quality of the photographic image.
Portraiture – feeling real is not (unlike other genres) to do with technique. It is to do with the embodiment of a living breathing subject.
Documentation – especially important with work that will be reproduced onscreen. There were more than one artist whose work didn’t make the cut just because their documentation was so bad.
Finding grace and beauty in the prosaic, the banal.
Contemporary – work should feel like it’s from our world right now, immanently present, not from a place of memory or nostalgia, or even from the no-place of indeterminate generality. (How do you paint an onion, or a bottle, or a vase of flowers, and make them feel like they’re from today? It’s not easy but it’s possible, as some artists here show.)