Grotto: Shrine
Soloway Gallery
Williamsburg, NYC
Through March 25, 2024
I’ve written before that art in this city finds incredible ways to survive. Whether it’s noise shows in unfinished apartment basements, poetry readings in sag-floored lofts, or operas performed on floating barges, the creators of NYC will find somewhere to put up what they’ve starved for making.
Soloway Gallery in Williamsburg is no exception. The space is nearly a closet and this Sunday they packed it wall to wall with beautiful works and curious folks, so much so that the crowd poured out onto the residential street and pressed its frigid February noses against the glass for a fleeting peek.
The pieces on display were well worth the crowd. Featuring the artists Ben Pederson, Oril Swergold, Laurel Sparks, and Sual Chernick, the show, “Grotto: Shrine,” seems to knowingly play on the nooked-and-crannied nature of the cramped gallery. There were many affinities between the works of the artists: A playful sensibility about color and form, obsessions with the shells of things and what those things serve to enclose, imaginative use of low materials like cardboard, string, modeling clay, prefab accoutrement. There are also gluts of glitter, plastic stars, rhinestone, grain, and pebbles. There’s a shared texture to the show: Sandy surfaces, pointillist approaches, shapes thumbily molded, and hammered abstractions.
The artist I’d like to highlight, though, is Ben Pederson, whose sculptures convert the game of hide and seek into a basic aesthetic rule. From a distance these sculptures, dappled to life in the aforementioned pointillist manner, seem built out of mounded and stretched flesh despite their hard geometry. Upon closer investigation, an array of dots like multi-colored stars reveal the sophisticated use of color Pederson has set as his scheme of contrast. Dancing around the edges, buried in pitch black pits, figures of softer abstract form invite the viewer into a microcosm of a larger, living world of beautiful shadow.
At the back of the gallery Ben stood by a larger piece of his, titled Sculpture Land. This spiring blast of color sported on its flanks, haunches, crags, and cliffs miniaturized reproductions of much more monumental pieces that Pederson had previously rendered. In his words, “This is sort of the imagined space where these things live. The place in my mind where all the ideas exist before I put them out into our world.” And it feels like a sort of completion of an aesthetic system. Pederson’s work deals with exteriors revealing what they hide, but never, until now, exteriorized in the interior.
There’s something tender here, something sweet and vulnerable and kind in the raw rendering of the geometry of one’s mind. Through that particularly explosive piece, which translates spirit into a purely aesthetic experience, Pederson crawls out of his own artistic crevices and invites viewers to outwardly celebrate the confusion of thoughts we often overlook or hide. Art in this city finds whatever way it can to thrive in the little dark slivers left to it, but Pederson and company refuse to shrink in the face of tight spaces.
