C H a P T E R N Y

C H A P T E R N Y Oct. 5, 2018 Perched atop five round white pedestals of varying heights, in Sam Anderson’s show, “A Flower is a Lovesome Thing,” at Chapter, are a slender papier-mâché princess; two grotesque babies with snowball heads and wooden struts for legs; a found ceramic hippo; and a tube of Babyganics sunscreen, its bold graphic sun logo peeking up over a collar of tape rolls. At one end of the gallery, near the door, sits a wooden harp with multicolored strings. At the other side, by the office, two low, armless figures watch a video pastiche of clouds, storks and hippos, accompanied by an eerie voice-over and the Vince Guaraldi Trio’s gentle 1957 instrumental take on the Billy Strayhorn song, after which the video and Ms. Anderson’s show are named. To me, this all felt both precious and ad hoc, as if the pieces weren’t finished sculptures but props, or even maquettes for props, for some unspecified performance. What I couldn’t figure out, at first, was just what that performance would be. But as I looked from the wedding-white princess, with her blank expression and tiny earrings, to the ceramic hippo, and from the yawning hippo to the grimacing, listing baby, and as I struggled to reconcile the chaotic bouquet of sadness, silliness, yearning, dislocation and theatrically exaggerated self-consciousness that Ms. Anderson’s work evoked in me, I finally recognized the performance she was going for: It was a long, slow wink, and I was doing it. WILL HEINRICH 60 Walker St., New York, NY 10013 C H A P T E R N Y CRITIC’S PICKS NEW YORK Sam Anderson CHAPTER NY 249 East Houston Street September 13 - October 21 “Does anybody need my love?” one of New York’s nine million strangers murmured on the street as I walked to this exhibition. His inquiry felt out-of-nowhere, gentle but rather threatening: descriptors that also apply to the show in question, Sam Anderson’s “A Flower Is a Lovesome Thing.” View of “Sam Anderson: A Flower Is a Lovesome Thing,” 2018. Here, other lovesome/lonesome things—a harp, an outsize cake-topper bride, a grinning tube of sunscreen—become stripped-down monuments to withheld affection. Anderson’s fragile, frugal sculptures often appear hurried to the point of incompleteness, as if to stress that her work is not a product of impassioned labor but of studied abandonment. It often puzzles. At a moment lousy with “immersive” art experiences, Anderson favors spatial and emotional exclusivity. Her deceptive whimsies signal inner worlds you may never access. In the room’s center, five tall, round plinths comprise an awkward archipelago. On separate pedestals are Two Babies (all works cited, 2018) made of papier-mâché and given a few taped-up sticks for legs. One mouthless tot eyes its frowning, turned-away twin, wondering perhaps if it could make the jump. The aforementioned bride, Paula, gazes at nothing, presumably jilted. Elsewhere, a pair of Best Friends—epoxy-clay and papier-mâché pawns conjoined at the hip—binge on a video bearing the show’s title. It’s projected to look like what Anderson calls a box-office window. The footage, comprising stock imagery and scored by the Vince Guaraldi Trio, loops through visions of longing: prayerful aliens, cartoon storks ferrying baby bundles, somersaulting astronauts, and napping hippopotami who bring to mind anthropomorphized internet darling Fiona the Hippo and her mother. There’s a voiceover, but it’s too soft to hear. Communication—its delicacy and swift infantilization— emerges as a concern, one underscored by the fact that each sculpture loosely resembles an emoji prototype. Anderson’s show doesn’t disclose much, but its unmoored feeling follows you outside, making you a little stranger. —Zack Hatfield 60 Walker St., New York, NY 10013 C H A P T E R N Y Sam Anderson’s The Great Assumption is rife with curiously dissimilar figurines and objects—a model airplane, a row of miniature containers atop a conveyor belt, and a diminutive caricature of a waitress make up a motley collection of sculptures molded in white paper mache. Elsewhere, a miniature plastic fairy statuette rests in front of a film about oranges, and another sits beside a swaying feather sculpture affixed to wires and small electronics. The exhibition is a study in absurdist arrangements, a curio of sorts that pique Anderson’s fancy and ultimate interest in the notion of transition and its broad undertones; the airplane tarmac, the rotating baggage conveyor belt, even the gates of heaven figure into the artist’s musings on movement and passageway. Anderson’s trajectory, however, is straightforward in some instances and circuitous in others. 60 Walker St., New York, NY 10013 C H A P T E R N Y While the artist looks to movement as a thematic, most of her works are stationary models. This lends an eerie tone to many pieces, which, like the jet replica Privacy (all works 2018), appear suspended in time. The tedium of delay likewise surfaces in Business Professional (all works 2018), a clay model of a man in the throes of waiting, his hands buried in his pockets in a gesture of rootedness. Lingering at these sites, the artist hones in on moments of monotony that disrupt the ever-moving flow of capitalist time. Here, the act of waiting is one that resists productivity, and quite literally slows us down. Other works encompass the theme with regard to progress, evolution, and transcendence. Waitress (a) and Waitress (b), for example, portray two female figurines in waist aprons, which seem to allude to the transitory exchanges that define this profession. For Anderson, the conditions of transition are not always overt or even concrete. Rather, they surround us in architectural and intangible spaces both evident and covert. She slows down at these sites, observing the altered perception and odd minutiae that surfaces when one reflects more deeply on the mutability of their surroundings. Sam Anderson: The Great Assumption runs February 17–April 8, 2018 at JOAN (1206 S. Maple Avenue, Suite 715, Los Angeles, California 90015). 60 Walker St., New York, NY 10013 C H A P T E R N Y 60 Walker St., New York, NY 10013 C H A P T E R N Y 60 Walker St., New York, NY 10013 C H A P T E R N Y 60 Walker St., New York, NY 10013 C H A P T E R N Y 60 Walker St., New York, NY 10013 C H A P T E R N Y 60 Walker St., New York, NY 10013 C H A P T E R N Y CRITIC'S GUIDE - 29 FEB 2016 Critic's Guide: Berlin BY ELISA R. LINN Cooper Jacoby, Tobias Kaspar, Kiki Kogelnik and more: the best current shows in Berlin Sam Anderson,Pregnant Kiwi Skeleton, 2015, Kiwi skeleton replica, egg replica, wood, acrylic, 21 × 57 × 19 cm. Courtesy Tanya Leighton, Berlin Sam Anderson: ‘Endless Love’ Tanya Leighton 26 November, 2015 – 27 February, 2016 New York-based Sam Anderson’s first solo at Tanya Leighton, ‘Endless Love’, comprises a scattering of objects, figurative sculptures, and an eponymous video work. Most of the (small) pieces sit on the floor, ostensibly marginalized; their atomized arrangement affording each an air of self-evidence. Possible connections are suggested but hardly given. Composed of various natural and artificial materials – including bird skeletons and orange peel – some of these figures rest on sheepskin and leather (skin is a recurring element in the show). In front of the video sits two simplified white tractors and nearby is a clay sculpture of the artist’s mother (a professional actor) holding a gong. Appearing again in the video she delivers a monologue comprised of various textual elements – extracts from personal conversations; an excerpt from a play. Yet the exhibition isn’t just the subjective staging of the artist’s own emotional connections. Anderson opens up a space where visitors can weave their own narratives into the objects on view. 60 Walker St., New York, NY 10013 C H A P T E R N Y ART & DESIGN ‘All Back in the Skull Together’ By KEN JOHNSON APRIL 9, 2015 Lynda Benglis’s sculpture “Swinburne Figure I.” Credit: Lynda Benglis/Licensed by VAGA, New York; Cheim & Read, New York Maccarone 630 Greenwich Street, at Morton Street, West Village Through April 18 It’s hard to say what if any conceptual point there is to this metaphorically resonant show, but its judiciously selected works by 17 artists all hang together beautifully. The first three objects, playing with feminine associations, are illustrative. Lynda Benglis’s “Swinburne Figure I” (2009) is a wall-mounted sculpture evoking a human torso made of crystalline-textured polyurethane tinted vivid pink. Nearby is a free-standing sculpture by Birgit Jürgenssen called “Cinderella” (1976), a wooden, half- life-size spiral staircase with a high-heel shoe on the top step. The shoe’s toe has surrealistically morphed into a flattened, flexible extrusion flowing down the stairs. A 60 Walker St., New York, NY 10013 C H A P T E R N Y small, grainy photograph taken sometime between the mid-1960s and the ’80s by Miroslav Tichy shows a woman’s legs in white tights and black slippers protruding from behind a wooden wall, calling to mind the Wicked Witch of the East’s legs jutting out from under Dorothy’s house in “The Wizard of Oz.” On the other side of the gallery, Sarah Lucas’s “Mammerylooloo” (2010), which has pendulous breasts made from stuffed tights spilling out of a real toilet, adds a note of raunchy feminist comedy.

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