"The Corner Show" Curated by Jan Dickey

 The Corner Show, 3rd floor exhibition view

By MAX VELEZ Jully, 2024

I arrived at The Corner Show the day of the opening haggard and sweaty in a way that only New York City can provide. The ten-artist exhibition emerged from curator Jan Dickey’s concept of a ‘corner painting’—‘a work which very specifically directs attention to its corners’. When you think about it: what even is a corner?  Does it have to be rectangular? Are there corners to life, to love, to pity, to politics, to change? These were my thoughts as I walked up those two flights of stairs on that muggy day in Chinatown. But let’s be real, like at most openings, I was most excited to see my friends and have a couple seltzers at the gallery’s expense.

"Within the parameters that corners create rests something specific and singular. It’s an object, a place, a plane." I put the exhibition materials down. My mind turned the phrases around, wandered, and settled in a new place: corners are joints, corners are tension. Still, talkitecture only gets you so far.

I had come to see one piece in particular, what I had assumed would be a painting, by an artist I love—Addison Bale. And as I wandered the gallery, I couldn’t focus on the other works before finding theirs. I texted them after having scanned both rooms twice without seeing any recognizable signs of their work. No paintings like theirs. Everything seemed like a blur. "I didn’t see yours, which one is it?" They texted back just as I left the gallery to grab a drink on Bayard. “It’s the poem!” they wrote. Huh, that’s a turn of events, I thought.

The drink proved to be the necessary energy to lure me back to the gallery for a second viewing: I was more motivated this time, the blur had turned to focus. Within the parameters that corners create rests multiple things, specifically, a line, itself a plane, forgotten about. The best works in the show take corners as raison d’être, like Robert Straight’s P-687, which doesn’t have any corners, and whose orange-square spiral pulls one’s attention to its center. The playfulness of the colors in Robert Straight’s work is endearing. Maybe corners aren’t so square after all. 

Robert Straight, P-687

I scanned both rooms again and found the poem, framed in white. I couldn’t bring myself to stand in front of Bale’s poem: who wants to read at a gallery opening? I thought. Eventually, I acquiesced, took a deep breath, read the poem, and then darted out to think. Yet, as I experienced many aspects of the show, the effect of their work hit me on the walk out. Going up the stairs to the second room, the lines “we’re / intrusions: or some of us: very much / intrude: where once was living: language: / in the stairwells” played over in my mind.

4th floor exhibition view, Bradley Milligan (left) & Ai Makita (right)

While at D.D.D.D., I experienced some of the worst gallery-viewing traffic jams I’ve ever encountered. We were shoulder-to-shoulder and smells were starting to brew: rubber-necking at the door next to the Bradley Milligan; a gapers’ block between the works of Cordy Ryman and Robert Straight. Yet Bale’s lines made me pause, reconsider. The mix of visitors strewn across the stairs and hallways struck me less as interlopers, and more as people taking advantage of the corners, angles, and planes the show created. 

  Addison Bale, The Building

In the first room there are three works in ‘corners’: Juvana Soliven’s Gauntlet I+II, Cordy Ryman’s Corner Stitch: Green, and Bradley Miligan’s "Holding". I was initially drawn to Ryman’s work, as it holds up the room. The small, wood cuboids are a playful green yet self-effacing while literally providing support to the structure of the show. Screwed into the top edge of the wall, they form an additional plane between the ceiling and the wall, drawing my attention to the tension, support, and structure of the show but also the building itself. The descent of Ryman’s piece onto a third wall recollects climbing holds—small, angled pinches—that allows the eye to draw new lines. New, skewed corners.

 Cordy Ryman, Corner Stitch Green [detail]

"Holding", the work by Bradley Milligan, rethinks the building in another, yet equally fascinating way: the piece is wedged on both the ceiling of the bottom gallery and the floor of the top gallery, creating a mirrored view that connects the second and third level. The work goes beyond the planes that any corner could create by describing what it is: it’s holding itself, the floor, and the wall together using nails, screws, general detritus. The physical materials of the corner itself.

 Cordy Ryman, Corner Stitch Green

Bradley Milligan, Holding

The installation on the second on the floor is tighter than the first: three works, each with enough space to breathe. Just because the work may be in corners, doesn’t mean you should use every corner, I thought to myself. I was greeted first by Julia Rooney’s Blue Screen, a patchwork screen of dyed fabrics (cotton, canvas, burlap), and leather, stretched over found wooden frames that obscure the corner(s) of the room. It’s a fun maneuver, that highlights the shifting nature of screens (planes with movable corners), and pushes one’s gaze to Ai Makita’s work in a corner to its left, a photorealist oil painting of biomorphic cylinders. These are the works that position the viewer’s body and attention away from the linear plane of the wall and, instead, encourage us to experience the pieces through the structure and volume of the room.

 Julia Rooney, Bluescreen (fourth edition) [detail]

 4th floor exhibition view, Ai Makita (left) & Julia Rooney (right)

 The Corner Show, 3rd floor exhibition view

The Corner Show works where a lesser show wouldn’t because of the straightforwardness of its premise. What unifies these works is less an overarching idea that could box them in—structurally suffocating them with four “corners”—but rather their underlying tension. This narrative plays out simply: there are corners, everywhere. They can cut. They can open. They can build. They can form the foundation for something bigger. And yet most corners we pass by without even noticing. WM