Arts Entertainment AND
MADE AND ERASED: Flour coats the floor at Good Weather Gallery’s September exhibit of the work of Anne Vieux, titled “same window, different day.”
GOOD WEATHER Lakewood pop-up gallery makes a home for art in limbo. BY TARA STICKLEY
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emember that childhood feeling of impending freedom when a snow day was announced and the elementary school shut down? That’s the elation of stolen time. Snow days, extended layovers in foreign countries — even brutal storms and their accompanying hardships — shut down daily routines and jostle us enough to revive a dormant sense of community, a strange time when people who wouldn’t normally converse do. Good Weather, where curator Haynes Riley stages monthly art shows, is one of those
places that run on weird time. It’s part art gallery, part picnic. It’s high art, but down South. It’s ahead of its time, and yet there’s something old school in the way it fosters camaraderie. Riley makes his home in the areas that lie in between. The native Arkansan and graduate of Cranbrook Academy of Art installed his master’s of fine arts thesis show in the joints and passages between the exhibition halls of Cranbrook, leaving fragile sheets of porcelain folded into the angles where the wall and floor met, as if they were on strike from the wall. He installed an enigmatic neon phrase over the doorway and lowered a light fixture to floor level. This artistic practice of nudging viewers to look where they normally wouldn’t has grown into a daring curatorial initiative in his home state. Good Weather is in a small brickwalled garage of a Lakewood home that belongs to Haynes’ older brother, Zachary Riley. It serves as an 8-by-11-foot exhibit space (the span of a single-car slot). From the gallery, you might see
strolling families or girls doing track practice; most people walking the lakeside promenade below the home in September don’t seem to notice the gallery on the opening night of its 31st show. The people who have noticed dot the lawn and chat about ancient Greek aesthetics and the Razorbacks, enjoying bowls of simmering tomato basil soup crafted by Riley’s mother, Marilyn Riley. Had you opened the mailbox near the garage door during the September exhibit, you’d have found hand-bound pamphlets describing the work of young New York-based artist Anne Vieux, and if you’d ambled into the garage on the night of the opening, you’d have seen a quartet of lush microsuede abstract panels and their creator standing on a floor that she’d dusted in two inches of flour. Vieux “captures light” by bending and photographing holographic and other reflective papers, which she then renders more abstract with software and prints on faux suede panels. Vieux paints over the printed surfaces and leaves further artifacts of her gestures
through disruptions in the suede from tape marks and hand imprints. She talks about “bringing virtual space down into material space” and the “confusion between ... digital and physical, and painting versus print.” At the opening of her installation “same window, different day,” pastel marks in three succinct pale blue stripes extended beyond the canvas onto the fresh white walls. The faux suede of the — let’s just call them paintings — asks to be touched, but we knew we can’t. The artist provides other tactile experiences, though; the cushiony suede benches situated neatly in the center of the gallery and the coating of bleached flour on the floor. Anne calls the flour a “mysterious white powder” related to “the idea of entropy, people’s tracks made and erased, and information lost.” Just before the opening, Vieux, Riley and I talk about the New York art world as we had experienced it. Chelsea, the sterilized main gallery district in New York, we agree, is the baseline for what it means to go see contemporary art. The CONTINUED ON PAGE 62
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OCTOBER 20, 2016
ARKANSAS TIMES