The Sound of It
Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York, NY, October 10 – November 16, 2013
It's in the harmonies and tensions between these colors and textures, between suggestions of both order and anarchy, decay and blooming freshness, that these works cough, splutter, and sing. If they really are the great analogs to interior life that I feel them to be, it's because Shechet knows that this life, expertly attended to, has its own folds and wrinkles, its own hollows and protuberances; that it is at once fugitive and monumental, characterized by strange, dreamlike changes of pace, unreasonable, asymmetrical, and ultimately unknowable.
At the Shainman exhibition, Shechet exhibited a pair of large, globular forms resembling pinkish heads (she says "heads, bubbles, rocks, moons") on stacks of kiln bricks glazed in black and white, titled So and So and So and So and On and On (2010). The association with Philip Guston was inevitable in the color pink, the iconography of heads and bricks, and the painterly facture of the surface. Indeed, as she has told me, Guston's studio is not far from where she lives in Woodstock, and she is acutely conscious of his influence-felt not only in the iconography and form, but in her work's deep vulnerability and humanity. And in its humor. “It's comic pathos.” She wrote me.
