Lindsay Walt - "Balancing Acts" exhibition catalog

LINDSAY WALT BALANCING ACTS

LINDSAY WALT Balancing Acts

Space Where It Can’t Be, Time Where There Isn’t Any

by Jack Stephens The sky is flat, optically speaking. There is no ground there, fore or back, and without reference to scale or parallax we cannot see the space in space. At night, the planets, stars, and Milky Way may as well be pasted onto a domed ceiling; in the daytime clouds are of little help. The vastness above us is as invisible as a wind with nothing to blow.

Putting space in a plane where by definition it cannot exist is arguably one of the painter’s greatest challenges. Tools of perspective are required for the realist, while the abstractionist who happens to care about it must employ tricks of density and luminosity, and juxtaposed and overlapping colors and shapes. One-hundred years ago, Kazimir Malevich achieved optical antigravity by floating opaque Euclidian circles, lines, and rectangles over fields of white. Fellow supremacist Lyubov Popova, whose “painterly architectonics” Walt admires, created irregular girder-like lattice patterns suggestive of industrial space. Later, L’aszlo’ Moholy-Nagy used geometries similar to Malevich’s in his compositions, but he added dimensionality by varying levels of transparency and color saturation, and overlapping or abutting the shapes so they seem to recede and tilt in unanchored architectural space. Now there is Lindsay Walt.

Viewers of her recent work will find the illusion of space to be the magic hat from which she conjures her powerful geometric abstractions and into which the viewer will be pulled. As I stand before the watercolors and oil paintings from the series Strata and Borrowed Scenery in Walt’s new show collectively titled Balancing Acts, I can imagine her holding a large diamond in her hand and gazing into it as Parmigianino did his convex mirror, turning it this way and that in different lights and moods as she examines its surfaces and depths for the endless possibilities of reflection and refraction. If she is representing anything at all in this collection of gemlike abstractions, it is not crystals per se, but crystallinity, and the deep space that can be found concentrated in a diamond’s heart if you know where and how to look. Given that, meditating on her works feels like stepping through a capsule hatch for a stroll among the stars.

In the Strata series, Walt’s watercolor explorations into the lattice pattern is inspired by the rhomboidal body shape compulsory to the Gabon magic reliquaries that she became obsessed

with after her mother’s death. The abstract body shape is most apparent in oils like Back and Beyond, and in the watercolor Strata (14) that preceded it, but she’s really exploring the articulated angles more than referencing the whole.

The title of the series comes from her technique of adding, subtracting, and adding blue watercolors to build lacey striations into the struts and braces of her lattices. Since watercolors dry quickly she works fresco-fast, using fully loaded brushes and sponges to add large amounts of color or remove whole areas in a swipe. This produces the desired translucency that translates, to my eye at least, as the fade and resolve of light and distance and the illusion of a great depth of field – the universe in a grain of sand.

Then there’s the dominant color of this series - sky-blue, the color of moisture and air. Out of the blue comes rain, and in its crystalline form, snow. Snowfall becomes snowpack becomes icecap, each layer a time machine trapping samples of past meteorological and atmospheric conditions so that archived in Antarctic is air 800,000 years old. Likewise, Walt’s watercolor technique locks in an immediate fossil record of every brushstroke’s intention and realization.

Continuing to explore the strategies that produced the Strata series, Walt next introduces non-representational narrative into the paintings of Borrowed Scenery. Building on repetitive one-step plot processes such as geological accumulation and sedimentation, she adds tension in the apparent actions of stacking, tumbling, teetering, levitating, balancing, and collapsing, as enacted by lozenges stacked like grains of rice, each one containing (like a reliquary?) some essence of moisture, air and sky. It is hard to find narrative drama in abstract paintings, and it is certainly absent from the earlier mentioned artists work, yet Walt manages to achieve it.

Even though her protagonists are abstract geometries, these non-objective shapes exist in a world of action and time, especially with earth-tone backgrounds acting as stages to ground the acrobatic dramas.

But of course, Walt is a restlessly explorative artist, in the way good artists are. Her strategy for discovery in the last works in this series is not limited to the action of pushing or pulling watercolor across paper. Constructing small collages as studies for the larger works, she cannibalizes rejected Strata attempts, cutting the blue lozenges into strips and reassembling them into the facets of gem-like structures whose sparkle patterns are random accidents of material and process. Her newest work behaves even more three-dimensionally. She has let go of the horizon and the gravity it implies. The viewer is now freed to drift in an ether.

The latticing returns, helping define and deepen the ether with a nod to Pavlova. In Borrowed Scenery, numbers 6, 7, and 8, the lozenges have become windows opening into non-objective “skyscapes” (her word) we are invited into.

These works are made to be penetrated by the viewer’s gaze in the virtual act of moving through the paper or canvas plane into the layered and unexpectedly deep space beyond. The sensation is something like flying at light-speed through a star-field, or experiencing the leaves-brushing-face sensation of moving through a dense bamboo thicket, or swimming submerged through a kelp forest. While one may stand back to observe and appreciate Maholy-Nagy’s ungrounded architectural spaces, Lindsay Walt’s Balancing Acts invite us into their spaces, where, once we let go of the horizon and the things of this earth as no longer necessary reference points, we are free to drift and wander through her sensuous conjurations of space and time.

Jack Stephens is a broadly published poet, novelist, and journalist, and has also scripted and produced over a dozen award-winning IMAX documentary features. He is currently at work on a novel about the events leading up to the conquest of Mexico.

Strata, 2017, installation view

Strata (2), 2017, watercolor on paper, 28 x 20.75 inches following pages: Strata (4), 2017, watercolor on paper, 28 x 20.75 inches Strata (5), 2017, watercolor on paper, 28.75 x 21 inches

Strata (12), 2017, watercolor on paper, 28 x 20.50 inches

Strata (14), 2017, watercolor on paper, 28 x 20.50 inches following pages: Strata (14), (detail)

Back and Beyond, 2017, oil on canvas, 60 x 48 inches

Blue Train, 2017, oil on canvas, 60 x 50 inches

The Long View, 2018, oil on canvas, 48 x 40 inches

Moving Still, 2018, oil on canvas, 38 x 40 inches following page: Moving Still, (detail)

Borrowed Scenery, 2018, installation view

Borrowed Scenery (5), 2018, watercolor on paper, 28.25 x 20.75 inches following pages: Borrowed Scenery Borrowed Scenery Borrowed Scenery Borrowed Scenery

(6), 2018, watercolor on paper, 27 x 21 inches (7), 2018, watercolor on paper, 28.25 x 20 inches (8), 2018, watercolor on paper, 28.25 x 21 inches (9), 2018, watercolor on paper, 28 x 21 inches

Borrowed Scenery (10), 2018, watercolor on paper, 28.75 x 20 inches following pages: Borrowed Scenery (11), 2018, watercolor on paper, 28.25 x 20.75 inches Borrowed Scenery (12), 2018, watercolor on paper, 28.25 x 20.50 inches

Borrowed Scenery (13), 2018, watercolor on paper, 28.50 x 21 inches following page: Borrowed Scenery (14), 2018, watercolor on paper, 21 x 28.50 inches

Disordered Graces, 2018, oil on canvas, 36 x 30 inches following pages: Rising, 2018, oil on canvas, 28 x 22 inches Ordered Things, 2018, oil on canvas, 36 x 30 inches

Tipping Point, 2018, oil on canvas, 28 x 22 inches

Mercury, 2018, oil on canvas, 28 x 22 inches

Lindsay Walt

EDUCATION Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, 1977 B.F.A. Rhode Island School of Design, 1978 M.F.A. The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, 1982

SELECTED SOLO EXHIBITIONS 2018 Balancing Acts, High Noon Gallery, New York, NY 2016 TOUCH down, 21st Street Projects, New York, NY 2013 Silk and Sequined Earth (with Marilla Palmer), the George Gallery, Laguna Beach, CA 2008 Metaphor Contemporary, Brooklyn, NY 2007 Domo Gallery, Summitt, NJ 1992 Barbara Toll Fine Arts, New York, NY 1991 Christian A. Johnson Memorial Gallery, Middlebury, VT 1990 New Sculpture, Barbara Toll Fine Arts, New York, NY

SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS 2018 Trading Places, John Molloy Gallery, New York, NY Social Photography VI, Carriage Trade, New York, NY 2017 The Painted Desert Part 1, High Noon Gallery, New York, NY The Painted Desert Part 2, High Noon Gallery, New York, NY 2015 between a place and candy: new works in pattern + repetition + motif, curated by Jason Andrew, 1285 Avenue of the Americas Art Gallery, New York, NY 2014 Aligned Works: Jill Levine + Lindsay Walt, Lockheart Gallery, State University of New York, Geneseo, NY The Brucennial, 2014, the Bruce High Quality Foundation, New York, NY between a place and candy: new works in pattern + repetition + motif by fifteen artists, curated by Jason Andrews, Matteawan Gallery, Beacon, NY 2013 Painting + Drawing, curated by Anya von Gossein, Newtonbarry House, Wexford, Ireland Silhouette, curated by Bill Carroll, Blackburn 20/20, New York, NY The Palm Springs Art Fine Arts Fair 2013, participating gallery The George Gallery, Palms Spring, CA Kentler International Drawing Space Benefit, Brooklyn, NY 2012 To Be A Lady: A Century of Women in the Arts, curated by Jason Andrews, The 1285 Avenue of the Americas Art Gallery, New York, NY Between the Two: Six from NYC, the George Gallery, Laguna, CA.

What I Know, curated by Jason Andrews, at NYCAMS, New York, NY 2011 Trace, Norte Maar for Collaborative Projects in the Arts, Bushwick, NY Sister City Project, New York, NYDos Pueblos-NY-Tipitapa Sister City Project, New York, NY Social Photography, Carriage Trade, New York, NY 2010 Kentler International Drawing Space Benefit, Brooklyn, NY The Central City Artists Project Benefit, New Orleans, LA Carriage Trade Benefit, New York, NY 2009 Kentler International Drawing Space Benefit, Brooklyn, NY 2008 One and One, John Michael Kohler Art Center, Sheboygan, WI 6th Annual 100 Small Works on Paper Benefit, Kentler International Drawing Space, Brooklyn, NY 2006 Mischief, Metaphor Contemporary Art, Brooklyn, NY Bridge Art Fair, Miami, FL Scope Art Fair, East Hampton, NY Group Show, Leslie Heller Gallery, New York, NY Two Friends and So on, Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York, NY Salon, Leslie Heller Gallery, New York, NY 2005 Summit Art Center, Summit, NJ 2002 Arrested Development, curated by Susan M. Canning, Castle Rock Gallery, College of New Rochelle, New Rochelle, NY

Design Trust Benefit, New York, NY Time Pieces, PS 122 Gallery, New York, NY 2000 Benefit, A.R.T., New York, NY 1999 Group Show, Bennington College, Bennington, VT 1998 The Tip of the Iceberg, Fred Dorfman Projects, New York, NY Group Show, Vedanta Gallery, Chicago, Il. (travelling) 1995 In Three Dimensions: Women Sculptors of the ‘90’s, Snug Harbor Cultural Center, SI, NY Works for A Fun House, E.S. Vandam, New York; curated by Canning, Ostrow, and Muranushi Contradictory Impulses, North Hampton Community College, North Hampton, PA.; curated by Rhonda Wall 1994 Re-Inventing the Emblem: Contemporary Artists Recreate a Renaissance Ideal, Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT Drawing Together, Nina Freudenheim Gallery, Buffalo, NY Fragmented Identity: Cut and Past, Julie Saul Gallery, New York, NY; curated by Lindsay Walt and Tina Potter Paper Dolls: Social Template, Police Building, New York, NY The Press: A Print Workshop, Horodner Romley Gallery, New York, NY 1993 Sculptors’ Objects, TZ Art, New York, NY Organization for Independent Artists Benefit, Brooke Alexander Gallery, New York, NY The Rag Trade (right off the rack), The InterArt Center, New York, NY Gallery Artists, Barbara Toll Fine Arts, New York, NY

New Museum Benefit Auction, New Museum for Contemporary Art, New York, NY Transient Decor, Room 311, Roger Smith Hotel, New York, NY; curated by Horodner Romley Gallery in collaboration with Saul Ostrow Women’s Art, Women’s Lives, Women’s Issues, Tweed Gallery, New York, NY Reversible World, B4A Gallery, New York, NY; curated by Susan M. Canning Songs of Retribution, Richard Anderson Gallery, New York, NY; curated by Nancy Spero Child’s Play, Art in General, New York, NY 1992 Mssr. B’S Curio Shop, Thread Waxing Space, New York, NY; curated by Saul Ostrow Detour, Columbia University, International House, New York; curated by Alisa Tager and Sandra Antelo-Suarez A Paper Trail, Berland/Hall Gallery, New York, NY, Permanent Collection, Samuel P. Harn Museum of Art, Gainesville, NC 1991 Gallery Artists, Barbara Toll Fine Arts, New York, NY 1990 Here and Now, Christian A. Johnson Memorial Gallery, Middlebury, VT Animation and Ornament, curated by Stephen Westfall, Emily Lowe Art Gallery, Syracuse, NY; travels to Roland Gibson Gallery, Potsdam, NY In Her Image, Barbara Toll Fine Arts, New York, NY 1989 The Milky Way, Shoshana Wayne Gallery, Santa Monica, CA About Devices, White Columns, New York Dan Reynolds and Lindsay Walt, Barbara Toll Fine Arts, New York, NY 1988 Small Works, Sculpture Center, New York, New York

Recent Acquisitions, Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Ridgefield, CT Relief Sculpture, Soho Center of the Visual Arts, New York, NY 1986 Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture Retrospective, Leo Castelli Gallery, New York; travels to Portland Museum of Art, Portland, Maine; University Gallery of Maryland, Baltimore, Maryland; University of Southern Florida, Orlando, FL 1985 Transformations, Richard Green Gallery, New York, NY

AWARDS Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture Fellowship, 1977 Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture Sculpture Prize 1977 McDowell Fellowship, 1994

SELECTED COLLECTIONS U.S. Embassy in Djibouti, ART in Embassies (ART) Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Ridgefield, CT Amerada Hess, New York, NY Chase Manhattan Bank, New York. NY New York Public Library, New York, NY Progressive Insurance Co., Prudential Insurance Co., New York, NY Simpson, Thatcher & Bartlett, New York, NY Samuel P. Harn Museum of Art, Gainesville, FL Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, ME Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT

Lindsay Walt | Balancing Acts September 6 - October 7, 2018 Edition of 150

Publisher: © 2018 Jared Linge HIGH NOON GALLERY

Art © 2018 Lindsay Walt Text © 2018 Jack Stephens Photography: Jeffrey Sturges

All rights reserved. No portion of this publication may be reprinted or reproduced in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, without prior permission from the publisher.

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cover: Borrowed Scenery (14), 2018, (detail), watercolor on paper, 21 x 28.50 inches