“Pop Sizzle Hum” and “Single Channels”

Schulnik, Hobo Clown (still), 2008

Ledgerwood, Honeypot, 2009

It’s easy to imagine floating through the midnight-blue sky and twisted flora of Dutch artist Jacco Olivier’s Van Gogh–like scenery in Wood (2007), which transcribes the heady experience of post-Impressionist landscape painting into video.

In “Single Channels,” experiments in animation by Olivier, Timothy Hutchings and Allison Schulnik yield exquisite results. With no more than a few buckets of paint, Hutchings rhythmically builds up and tears down colors and forms in Battle of the Mass (2008), revealing a precise, impressive dedication to stop-motion filmmaking. Yet the show’s high point is Schulnik’s claymation short Hobo Clown (2008). The artist forms a seemingly infinite range of emotions from her medium, following her title character from an old shack to a flowering paradise to a psychotic episode that reduces him to a whirlpool of multicolored clay.

In the main gallery, the six works in “Pop Sizzle Hum” explore color, composition and form in ways that recall Abstract Expressionism and Minimalism. But the formal color studies of Steven Husby’s two untitled canvases and the vibrant pop of Judy Ledgerwood’s Honeypot (2009) lack depth in comparison to Carrie Gundersdorf’s Star Trails–52 Minutes. Gray, blue and purple lines streak across the canvas, mapping the paths of stars throughout the night. Like Gundersdorf’s other works (which include meditations on planetary rings and illustrations of light spectrums), this piece thoughtfully combines painterly expression and hard data.

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