Vulpes Bastille’s Other Windows shows a faraway nearby

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What came to mind when I first walked through Other Windows, the group exhibition now at Vulpes Bastille, sounds a little grandiose now. Examining the works by Olivia Gibb, Cristina Muñiz and Annie Woodfill (curated here by Kansas City Art Institute painting instructor Jonah Criswell), I thought of Venice. I thought of the kaleidoscopic, impossible Venice of Italo Calvino’s novel Invisible Cities.

Told you it was a little grandiose. But the fascinating art here — which adds up to something quite Calvino-like — is not.

All three artists use their respective mediums to explore the vague, in-between spaces of history, language and memory. Gibb’s drawings, Muñiz’s oil paintings and Woodfill’s cardboard structures behave in the room together like three narrators comparing three distinctly abstract story notes, not necessarily in the same tongue. None strictly reproduces the art of any specific time or place being referenced — not, per se, the punk zines of Oakland or the abstract expressionism of Spain or the whimsical Dada sculptures of Zurich. Still, many of the works in the show call to mind just those things, with each artist cannily deploying notions of color, play and shape to dismantle norms and erect something new.

Other Windows is aptly titled, the phrase reflective of how these three emerging artists use — or hold themselves apart from — what has come before in order to illuminate their individual practices. If images identifiable by their relationship to the empirical world or to our shared human experience represent one way of defining canonical art — images we see through plain glass — then Other Windows offers intriguing distortions. Through Gibb’s, Muñiz’s and Woodfill’s panes, we see a place that floats in a panoramic mist — a thought balloon awaiting, say, the gossamer myths spun by Calvino’s reimagined Marco Polo. The pieces at Vulpes Bastille connect filaments of disparately conceived illogic to light a world just out of reach.

Gibb’s detailed pencil drawings adhere to the absurd physics of cut-and-paste logic, distorting perspectives and foregrounds to create multidimensional scenes from calamitous dreams. Faces of women — statuary women — gaze back, surrounded by patterns and markings far removed from ancient sculpture. Timelines condense as we see the detailed statue faces lying still beside flat, mismatched patterns that appear hastily sketched. These could be the cutouts and collages of punk zines shot back in time. Busted statues litter a landscape beside a sinking moon, coming to terms with ideals of figure representation evolved well beyond the simply classical;
bodies of stone coexist with the floating faces of our post-digital culture. What is old is not necessarily correct, but neither is what is new.

Checker patterns appear in a number of drawings, as castoff fabric blowing through the dark backdrop of space or as a kind of curtain from which limbs and faces emerge. “Face on Tan Paper” contains a number of Gibb’s repeated elements: the checker pattern, the forceful marks, the skin peeled back to reveal patterns. On the left side of the drawing, a reflection hits the face as though from nearby gentle water. The materiality of the marks is just as important as the images on the page (though Gibb knows when to hold back, too, knows when negative space conveys something more dynamic than marks). Entire quadrants of some drawings are blanketed in graphite, until the sight of the heavy marks becomes something physical as well as emotional for the viewer. You feel the press of the tool against the obedient paper.

Muñiz’s refracted narratives echo aspects of works by Willem de Kooning and Arshile Gorky, while her bold and colorful palette owes something to Robert Delaunay. The colorful forms lend few details, offer few hints about what they might represent. “Smuggled Water” presents four quadrants of a canvas as four chapters of a story, one in which shapes and colors become characters bumping into one another. A pale white mark invades shapes that resemble faces looking at each other. In “When we used to,” a blue tumbler floats on the upper-right side of the painting, though the three brown rectangles jutting from the glass resemble neither ice cubes nor a straw, challenging what seems at last easy to recognize. A glowing, fiery orb below the tumbler begins to look like a summertime grill, the pastel seafoam square on the left a pool — ingredients of a serene outdoor afternoon. Still, it’s hard to be sure, and Muñiz’s art here delights in misdirecting our analysis. She is, above all, an artist at play, happily dodging the history of abstract painting (and occasionally asking permission to play a little longer).

Woodfill’s cardboard sculptures resemble periscopes and tablets that project the world she sees down into the gallery. Words scribbled in gold ink across a flat, blue surface on “Alfiz/Stroop” reflect back into themselves as the sentences start to repeat — beginning again in reverse once at the end of a clause. You have to kneel to read the small lettering, and you no sooner make it to the middle than you soon find yourself back at the beginning, scooted along by language. The words are printed by hand rather than spit from a computer algorithm or some other avenue by which the duplicate phrases could have achieved symmetry. Below this piece, the pedestal is made of Styrofoam, a playful nudge from Woodfill and her practice of setting up studio debris in formal gallery spaces — as if she’s saying, “If it’s white and the art is on top, then yes, this is a pedestal.”

Other objects are similarly perched here, sometimes with added slats of wood that prop the structures above the surface of the foam. The literal elevation of daily materials shows us the awkward puberty of garbage, the things we consume in their youth but don’t see through to old age. By adding the element of written language to the objects, Woodfill forces us to connect to her medium the same way she has. The action of moving these clusters of meaning and inspiration out of her studio and into the gallery is a sign of an object’s graduation. Interwoven conversations between the words she has written by hand and the manufactured phrases still printed on the cardboard duel like a teenager talking back to a parent. While you’re busy reading some winding testimony that feels inert, computer-sequenced, a series of logical predictions, Woodfill is enveloping you in something greater: a spinning dialogue of art, justice and storytelling.

Another Woodfill sculpture — another of her pieces that uses simple materials to make us feel safe even as she means to provoke a little anxiety — instructs simply: “FOLD HERE.” And so she and her peers in Other Windows do: Their art folds our perceptions, striking a balance between what feels familiar and what is alien.