Whitehot Magazine
"The Best Art In The World"
Gregg Woolard (2024) “Building Boom”; Flashe paint on panel, 36x36 inches.
By JOHN DRURY July 18, 2024
There exists a certain joy to be derived of art placed in the wild – that outside the sterility of the sanctified white box…a certain feral nature, contributing a veracity and legitimization in stumbled upon offering - just not a part of the experience, in purposeful and destination forays to arts pooled gallery experience; that so often thick and repetitive, in whatever is the flavor of the month. And there is presently, at Brooklyn’s Nha Minh - an eatery specializing in Vietnamese fare - a pairing of artist’s works…OG’s from what was once the “scene” on Ludlow Street, during the 1990’s Lower East Side slow revitalization.
The show here is accessible everyday - but Monday - and perhaps while securing yourself a healthy breakfast, as accompanied by the aroma of Banh Mi, or Banh Xeo and a coffee or tea – you might discover also, a work affordable a blue-collar budget, of artwork not tethered to the fancier gallery’s customary 50% take. You may very well find yourself a square deal (and a reasonably priced meal); similar, the roadside farm stand’s moment of stumbled upon, happenstance – that enticing offering, revealing exactly that, which you had not previously realized was missing from your regimented life. And life in NYC seems increasingly systematic, and cold, when you bother to look up from that phone-screen where you go to hide, in attempted escape its urban friction and eye-contact.
Gregg Woolard (2021) “Loopy”; Casein on vellum on panel, 11.75x16 inches.
Allow sociable. Say hello, at Nha Minh and the metaphorical Farm Stand there, presently installed. A bit of nostalgia then, is part of this experience – a call back – to a time when makers and the establishments that they frequented worked hand-in-hand, and in mutual respect, to raise all ships; that humanity largely absent now, in the thoroughly commodified Manhattan – robbed of alternative flavor, first by henchman Ray Kelly and his superior (his task-master) Michal Bloomberg’s downtown stop and frisk gentrification, known racist. And when you scatter the rats, they run in all four directions…and away...to dilute the soup, of once boiling creativity that was the Lower East Side.
Jim Damron (2024) “Midtown Rooftops”; oil paint on canvas, 24 x 24 inches.
There is that aura of reminiscence (even melancholy) in Jim Damron’s painted cityscapes. Abandoning his decade-and-change long tenure downtown, for the bucolic nature of rural California, his work a longing for personal reclamation that earlier era, finds expression in that shabby chic that is, for example, reflective in the Empire State Building’s old school brick and mortar. There is not in Jim’s work, the glass and steel frigidity increasingly the face of Manhattan’s sky-scraping elitism its replacement, as the island nears gated community. Damron’s depictions allow, to celebrate, a homogeny of possibility in a visually even playing field; all is (was) allowed, in a state of visually implied cohesion; an Americana perhaps lost.
Gregg Woolard (2019) “Demon Mind”; Casein and acrylic on Masonite, 11x8 inches.
Gregg Woolard sees simply shape, in desired sense-making the post-9/11, post-Covid change, and like the denizens of his fair city of choice for more than four decades, it comes in dense and interchangeable bundles. Clustered, its form is sometimes dimpled and bruised; little is perfect at the farm’s stand, but what you get there, is rewarding and guaranteed fresh. A sprinkling of rainfall only enhances its exterior appeal and Woolard’s surfaces, sometimes waxy, mimic the shirt-polished apple, or pear, the product of clean air and expanded chest rubbing. Shape up. Woolard’s is an appreciation the colors and structure cacophony; a frilled edge offering respite.
And so - throw caution to the wind. Dawdle your way to Farm Stand, at Nha Minh, and indulge yourself. Pop up. Fucking, heal already kids. Take that “sound-bath”, if you absolutely must, and put those faux-hippy bells and gewgaws on your tattooed fingers and toes, and get out there. Get (down and) dirty. There is when you leave the rotten core, for the outer Burroughs of NYC, still the mom and pop; humanity. Stop looking for your suburban past, in trips to Whole Foods and eek out, not the corporate, but that yet authentic by way the homemade. WM
John Drury is a multi-media artist, published author, independent curator and instructor. Drury holds a Bachelor of Fine Art degree from the Columbus College of Art and Design (1983) and a Master of Fine Art Degree in sculpture (1985; including a minor in painting), from Ohio State University. John is the father of two teenagers, living in New York City since 1989 and has received the prestigious Louis Comfort Tiffany Award for his work in sculpture.
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