Iridian Gallery’s “The Closest Thing to Free I’ve Ever Known,” paintings by Richmond artist Colin Harris, and “Rock Hard: Works in Wood and Stone” by Adam Atkinson are surprising and evocative in very different ways.
Colin Harris’s paintings are exuberant bursts of love and vitality. Cartoon-like, mustachioed characters in speedos and cowboy hats and boots frolic in pastel, psychedelic landscapes. They embrace and dance and flex their muscles against drippy, pink sunsets, beneath pastel rainbows, and alongside gushing rivers. Across many of the paintings, text curlicues around the figures and courses through the revelry. One piece reads, “All the Love,” another “To Be Both Free & Safe.”
“Désenchantée,” perhaps a nod to the eponymous song by the French pop icon Mylène Farmer, is a round painting of five portraits of the same mutton chopped fellow. Two are crowned with halos, two with devil horns, and the one wedged between them with neither—a representation of the moods and modes we all don at times, sometimes simultaneously. The faces are framed by the words Tout est Chaos à Côté [“everything is chaos all around me”] and an ouroboros. Rust-colored yarn wraps around the edge making the whole piece feel like a drum, a dream catcher, and a God’s eye.
The exhibition description text tells us that “each piece becomes a representation of the closest thing to free [Harris has] ever known at the time of their creation.” Standing in front of his work, you can feel that energy and spirit like the bolt of cosmic light emanating from the heart of the man running through “A Million Lights are Dancing and There You Are, A Shooting Star.”
Most of the paintings are on found wood panels, some tied together with yarn making a kind of D.I.Y. book, which gives them a spontaneous and earthy feel—as if Harris is so overcome with joy and celebration that he must paint immediately, on whatever material is lying around. In “Erotic City,” a cowboy’s eyeballs bulge the way a Loony Toons coyote’s might when a sexy coyote slinks by. AWOOGA, the painting reads; the sound we assume the cowboy makes the instant desire sets his loins and heart ablaze. The depiction is hyperbolic in one sense, but on the other hand, damn if it doesn’t feel like that in real life. There’s a definite 1970s underground comix feel, think R. Crumb and Barbara “Willy” Mendes’s bendy-limbed folks gallivanting through spiraling, trippy chaos. There’s also a loving, hobo earnestness like an ultra-erotic, pansexual Margaret Kilgallen. Shiny, pink mylar streamers and lengths of branches and leaves decorate the walls and gallery space. The whole experience feels like you followed a distant thump of bass to a secret clearing by the river where the best party of the year just got into full swing.
Adam Atkinson’s show feels as restrained as Harris’s is ebullient. In one room, over a dozen handmade, thick handled, wooden brushes hang from the walls. In another, elliptical stone rings adorn the floor, each perched on an oval of mulch, a sculpted rocking chair-like saddle sits among them. The title of the show is “Rock Hard,” and sex, arousal, and desire permeate the rooms a bit more than other connotations—rock music, the materiality of Atkinson’s mediums. With the former in mind, looking at these meticulously crafted brushes becomes fun and welcomingly perverse. On one end of each brush is a rounded loop by which it hangs from a nail on the wall. On the other, a collection of short, bushy bristles (soft or coarse? The desire to touch them was strong.). They looked like stubby calligraphy brushes or elaborate shaving brushes. Some pieces ended in two conjoined brushes. Some handles were long, some short. Some straight, others carved into careful squiggles. Their uniqueness seemed to imply different uses or results of their uses. They hung so plainly, equidistant from each other, and on white walls so a sterile, clinical, experimental (or even ascetic) feeling rose up in me, contrasting the warmth of the wood grain and lovingly carved curves.
They were tools or baffling implements, but contextless. Their use, because of our ingrained desire to figure things out, was your guess. Could they be used on a body? Erotically or hygienically? Were they special brushes used to clean odd-shaped imaginary vessels? Silly, absurd paintbrushes of an eccentric artist?
Similarly, the other room’s installation with the almost vaginal stone shapes on the floor, felt purposefully absent of meaning. But in this case, some of the quizzical delight of the previous room was missing. These sculptures and their arrangement felt intentionally unbeautiful, intentionally evocative of female genitalia, but beyond these obvious qualities, meaning seemed to end. I wanted just one more idea to cling to.
“The Closest Thing to Free I’ve Ever Known” and “Rock Hard: Works in Wood and Stone” are up at Iridian Gallery until Sept. 14.
