Water of Life

Catenations at Tiger Strikes Asteroid

Installation view of Catenations at Tiger Strikes Asteroid New York. Image courtesy of the gallery.

Catenations at Tiger Strikes Asteroid New York is one of the first shows I’ve seen since the pandemic started. I wondered if seeing work mid-pandemic and in our current political climate would somehow change how I looked at it, but I found that I wasn’t eager for the work to justify itself by announcing its utility. I felt thirsty for art, whatever it may be and whatever it wanted to say. Catenations quenches this thirst with a variety of artworks that explore the theme of water on multiple levels, both global and local. I was drawn to works that touched on this theme in a way that became personal, either by being intimate and tactile, or because of a heightened psychological and emotional charge.

Mary Dwyer, Sanitation Workers, 2020, acrylic on board, 10 x 8 in. Image courtesy of the gallery.

This is the case in Mary Dwyer’s intimately-scaled painting Sanitation Workers (2020). In this painting, two men walk down a dusty street, presumably to their jobs—the older man carries a pail while the other carries some nondescript tool. Its understated monochrome composition underscores a feeling of openness and comradery between the two characters. While its mood is jovial, the plight of working-class sanitation workers—who work in dangerous conditions with inadequate protections in many parts of the world, including India—is less sanguine. Dywer’s painting is a nod to these workers and the important work they do for their communities.

Karolin Schwab, Black Water, 2018, mixed media, dimensions variable. Image courtesy of the gallery.

German artist Karolin Schwab uses water as a transient sculptural medium. Black Water (2018) consists of three black granite-like discs, each about a foot or two in diameter, arranged on the gallery floor, acting as mirror-like reflecting pools into which the viewer is invited to peer. The piece subtly acts as way of marking time, with the water evaporating and refilling throughout the course of the exhibition.

Motohide Takami, detail of Fire P, 2013, oil on canvas panel, 51.2 x 76.4 in. Image courtesy of the gallery.

Motohide Takami’s Fire P (2013) depicts a night scene of a pristine white house burning in a heavily wooded landscape at edge of a river or a lake. Its reflection on the rippling water is striking in its digital-like distortion. The water registers or witnesses the disaster, simultaneously acting as a conduit and distancing the viewer from the scene. For me, the painting’s absences are more interesting than what appears in it. There are no roads leading up to the house, and no boats, cars, or docks, either. It simply a solitary house cut off from any others. The manner in which this unfolding disaster is depicted, as an event marked by solitude and abandonment, is unnerving.

Phoebe Murer, Raging Waters, Wildwood, NJ, 2011, oil on canvas, 60 x 36 in. Image courtesy of the gallery.

In Phoebe Murer’s joyous, light-filled painting Raging Waters, Wildwood NJ (2011) I was similarly struck by how certain details left out of the painting could be read in a way that colored its meaning. This scene depicts vacationers having a raucous, wonderful time at a water park against the backdrop of an eerily empty beach. This abandoned beach made me wonder if it was empty for a reason—pollution, high waves, or sharks. For me, the sight of an empty beach is alarming and signals a problem with the water.

Jodie Lyn-Kee-Chow, Starmageddon (documentation of performance at Secret Garden Art Festival, Studio 7, Temporary Ungovernable Zone Fort Tilden Beach, Queens, NY, 2017), 2017, digital print, 4 x 6 in. Photo credit: Christopher Garcia Valle. Image courtesy of the gallery.

Pollution and the damage inflicted on the ocean by humans are explored more explicitly in the photo-documentation of Jodie Lyn-Kee-Chow’s performance Starmageddon in which the artist is entangled in a large fishing net like a captured dolphin or mermaid. The artist identifies with the ensnared animal in this piece: trading places with the animal in such a visceral, bodily way communicates a profoundly human sense of being trapped, like Gregor Samsa waking up to find himself transformed into a cockroach in Kafka’s Metamorphosis.

Gail Biderman, Water Way, 2020, felt, dimensions variable. Image courtesy of the gallery.

The net used in Lyn-Kee-Chow’s performance hangs from the ceiling of the gallery, as if draped over the side of a fishing boat. Similarly, Gail Biederman’s installation piece Water Way (2020) also descends from the ceiling. Water Way consists of pieces of blue and grey felt shaped like bodies of water. The piece, which reads as an assemblage-like wall painting, spans the length of the gallery. Parts of the installation are also delightfully strewn—like drying laundry—over the space’s easily-overlooked water pipes. The idea of drawing attention to the pipes seemed calculated and gimmicky to me at first, but as I spent more time in the gallery I realized that Biederman’s piece, like Karolin Schwab’s reflecting pools, allows the viewer to reflect on water in a bodily manner.

Installation view of Catenations featuring Jodie Lyn-Kee-Chow’s Starmageddon, 2009, industrial fishnet, fabric, and shells, variable dimensions. Image courtesy of the gallery.

While the show’s overarching theme—the social, economic, historical and political implications of water—is especially relevant today, I think that this show’s strength is how it conveys ideas of global proportions in a very personal way. Takami’s use of water as a metaphor for social isolation, alienation, and distancing—being cut off and left alone to brook one’s own disaster— in Fire P is especially affecting in its nuanced way of communicating through landscape. Takami turns the old adage of “no man is an island” on its head, painting an isolated burning house on an island as a stand-in for those who, like lepers, are cut off by the apathy and distancing of their community. Looking up at Lyn-Kee-Chow’s net, I could imagine myself or someone else ensnared in it, and that bodily sense of feeling trapped was especially powerful after emerging from months under quarantine.

Catenations
Atul Bhalla, Gail Biederman, Jodie Lyn-Kee-Chow, Mary Dwyer, Timothy Fadek, Julia Krolik and Owen Fernley, Phoebe Murer, Bridget Frances Quinn, Karolin Schwab, Motohide Takami and Cheryl Yun
Curated by Rachael Gorchov and Jo Yarrington
September 11 – October 11, 2020
Tiger Strikes Asteroid New York
1329 Willoughby Ave, Brooklyn NY