Unfurled is an interpretative curatorial conceit that links six highly distinctive artists to make an exhibition. It also serves as a layered metaphor of the show’s evolution and the historic moment shared by artists and audience as we emerge from the pandemic. The unfurling identified within the artworks unites with a sense of coming out of isolation, of the unfurling of flags in remembrance, relief and celebration.

The largest piece here is a hold-over from our previous presentation, a solo exhibition by Jennifer Riley. So much effort went into the creation of the sumptuous and well-received mural that lent its name to that show, Schmetterlingshaus (inspired by the butterfly pavilion at Vienna Zoo) that it simply felt too soon to dismantle it. Both the theme and formal elaboration at the heart of this mural take on new meanings in relation to the group show into which it now unfolds.

As guest curator for the 2020/21 season, my idea for the third of three shows here at 1GAP Gallery revolved around notions of negative/positive space, non-serial reiteration and complex interactions of shape and color. The first three artists I thought of were Willard Boepple, David Rhodes and Kim Uchiyama. While these themes can, actually, also be found in Riley’s mural there's a rather different vibe between evoked butterflies and buildings (in a mural less resolutely abstract than previous iterations of Riley’s “BBS” series) and the three harder-edged abstractionists I was thinking to work with next. To round out the show, therefore, Erin O’Brien and Jason Stopa were brought in to balance the group while allowing shared commonalities to proliferate.

I am conscious that some might consider it gauche to confess to the mental contingencies that lead to the formation of a group exhibition. Quasi-diplomatic convention requires the fiction that such constellations somehow come together with total equality. But as we are all living in an age where muddling along is the new normal, why not savor the serendipity of a group forming along the growth algorithm of a quilt?

Unfurling, as a notion, signals an elaboration of forms, signs, shapes or chromatic effects in a way that is suggestive of these elements growing out of themselves to reveal unexpected visual glories—much, indeed, like the hatching butterflies.

Willard Boepple is a sculptor with early roots in painting whose printmaking unites the impulses of both mediums. He is represented by partial sequences from within various series of screenprints (each color variant is actually unique, a monoprint). His abstract compositions take their names from things in the world they might recall, like “Hourglass,” “Rooster,” or “Fence,” where perspectives change according to variations in color. Erin O’Brien’s paintings of clearly delineated, though hard to define shapes play against the neutrality and actuality of exposed linen. Her compositions are generated through collage-like abstracted line drawings of observed features in architecture and the body, sometimes her own. And in one or two works, visual correlatives are explicit: a bunch of flowers from a Morandi painting, for instance. David Rhodes negotiates the interplay of negative and positive space without recourse to figure-ground dynamics. Raw segments and the edges of painted segments are protected or defined through the use of masking tape resulting in compositions of abruptly cropped sections. He likens the progress of his execution to the working of a loom. Examples of his familiar idiom of alternating bands of black and canvas now bookend Riley’s mural in the lounge, while the works seen in the conference room explore new motifs arising from intersections of diagonals. Jennifer Riley’s Schmetterlingshaus exploits the negative space in the plasma-cut steel sheets (the appropriated industrial by product that has become a trademark of her work) offsetting positive forms against painted grounds. This in turn relates to Jason Stopa’s playful composition in which signs and gestures sit within the framing space upon which they are elaborated. His style has been characterized as “Pop Formalism” for the way it combines almost childlike, vernacular, cheerfully colored signs and signifiers in earnest explorations of painterly-philosophical inquiries such as the relation of figure to ground, or the definition of boundaries in works of art. And Kim Uchiyama’s graceful gliding brushstrokes of aqueous color interact equally with the page and the other strokes upon it. Her watercolors are a discrete subsection of an oeuvre otherwise dominated by large, more strictly formalized oil paintings. These works on paper, which build a sense of tangible topography, took initial inspiration from boats bobbing in the harbor of a port in Puglia where she took part in an artists residency, along with the light and heat of that locale.

Enough diplomacy survives to know that, in a group exhibition of six artists, you can’t choose an image of one them for the introductory wall text. Better to go left of field and represent the theme itself, as here, with a literal unfurling of a flag. The stars and stripes would be too easy; instead, here, flying recently within the same borough, is a specially commissioned flag piece by Williamsburg-based portrait artist Brenda Zlamany. She was part of an ongoing program run by her neighbor James Esber on his Grand Street roof. Defiance, celebration, warning, rallying: all these impetuses for unfurling a flag animate Zlamany’s portrait of masked fellow artist Justin Sterling who peers out from a lined cloth whose tapering black strokes on a white ground recall a kaffiyeh in just the right balance of protection and resistance.

David Cohen, April 2021