—Work featured in Encaustic Works ’11, a book published by R&F Handmade Paints focusing on art by contemporary artists and an essay by Joanne Mattera.

—Prints available through flatfile, at SUGAR: 449 Troutman Street, #3-5, Brooklyn (Bushwick), NY.

—Coming soon: New porcelain work, venue to be announced.

There is a standard hierarchy in a deck of cards. The king is always more powerful than the jack or the queen; the nine is always higher than the five. The only card with the capacity to swing is the ace, and it swings in the extreme, alternately ranking as the highest or the lowest card in the deck. Amongst the four aces, the ace of spades also carries a folkloric connotation as the “death card,” in which death translates not as the conclusion of mortality but as a symbol of transition. As such, the ace of spades is an apt theme for a group show straddling the passage between years.

The ace of spades is also, simply, black—a color with its own abundance of cultural, political, and social associations. Blackness predominates in the work of the three artists whom Gwendolyn Skaggs, founder and director of SUGAR,selected for Ace of Spades. In a space small enough to feel intimate—though hardly cramped—Hilda Shen’s five neatly framed monotypes face one of Vincent Como’s buckling works in ballpoint pen on paper. An installation of Alex Binder’s atmospheric black-and-white photographs sprawls asymmetrically on a third wall, acting as a visual bridge between the work of Shen and Como.

Binder’s photographs have a gritty, grainy quality to them, which enhances the overt eeriness of his subject matter. There are hooded figures in a forest, many masked faces, an old pistol on an old wall, a tarantula, and a horned human atop a bluff, to name but a few of Binder’s occult images—there are over 30 in all. The photographs (all 8 by 10 inches) are taped to the wall and curl slightly, adding a shadowy dimension to their installation. Yet despite the spooky, spectral character of Binder’s photographs, they evoke a kind of tranquility. Nothing is actually menacing. Even the more ominous figures appear pensive, as if Binder caught them in the depths of contemplation.

Hilda Shen’s monotypes loosely picture the night sky as it might look in a time-lapse photograph. Unlike Binder’s images, however, there is a more pronounced element of violence in Shen’s work. As is customary in monotypes, Shen begins with the paper’s surface completely inked and creates an image through a process of erasure. Rather than use the standard tools, Shen rubs, scratches, and digs into the paper with her fingernails, elbows, and palms. Interestingly, three of the five pieces are titled “Illumined,” suggesting illumination as a consequence of eradication. Yet in the process of removing the ink—of cancelling out the darkness—she imbues each monotype with a trace of her physical presence. In doing so, Shen establishes a certain duality between what she adds and extracts, which compliments the relationship between darkness and illumination, as well as the physical violence employed to evoke what is typically considered peaceful: stars swirling through a night sky.

Vincent Como’s work is also ink on paper, though Como’s process is strictly additive. “Untitled (Reinhardt)” is a square—five feet in width—covered completely with ink from a ballpoint pen. Like Reinhardt’s famous black paintings, Como works from a grid that almost disappears under the inky gleam. Where Reinhardt intended his surfaces to be immaculate and smooth, Como favors distortion. His paper bulges and bows beneath the weight of so much ink. The fragility of Reinhardt is exchanged for a sense of heaviness and distress. “Untitled (Reinhardt)” is a work that embodies equally the concentration necessary to complete such an arduous inking process, and the turbulence which that process produces.

Taken as a whole, the works in the exhibition compliment one another nicely, and share a common characteristic that corresponds with the ace’s transitional history. One of the primary elements of each work is relatively unsophisticated—ballpoint pens (Como), fingernail scratches (Shen), masking tape (Binder)—yet the final pieces are all unquestionably refined. In this regard, each work might be considered high-art, which nonetheless contains a strand of the lowly. Likewise, the ace was traditionally the lowest card in the deck until angry French proletariats overthrew their monarchy and instituted a new rule: ace high. This transition symbolized the heart of the French revolution; the commoners’ card outranked the king. The ace of spades, which had previously been the least valuable card, became the highest card in the deck.

“Is it snowing there yet?” I ask artist Hilda Shen, who has graciously agreed to open the art gallery Sugar (449 Troutman St. #3-5, bell 21) for me during holiday-off hours. “Not much” she replies, “just a dusting … like confectioners sugar”, an incidental wordplay that I savor as I crunch my way through the snow.

“Ace of Spades” on view at Sugar through January 15th, is a small but toothsome offering of 3 artists whose work indicates a mutual affinity for the color black. Gallerist Gwendolyn Skaggs’ show statement suggests additional areas of overlap, such as a shared concern with life and death or distance and proximity.

The gallery’s center wall is consumed by a lithe installation of over 30 photographs, co-selected by gallerist Skaggs and German photographer Alexander Binder. Simulating an electrocardiogram, the staccato arrangement of these dark photographs has a definite pulse, even if their subject matter bleeds black. Fixated on the macabre, the occult and the phantasmagorical, Binder’s black and white images (horned figures and hooded beasts) are engaging and mischievous, as the artist (born on Halloween, actually) seems to employ this grim vocabulary almost playfully, akin to the sporting of a scary mask.

The tenebrous tone is continued in the captivating mono-prints of artist Hilda Shen. Composed on a black ground, these prints consist of white and smoky dream-like forms, encircled by electric marks. Shen shares that she creates these enigmatic images intuitively, through a process of removing ink in layers, solely with her body (nails, elbows, thumbs and palms). The employment of memory, touch, process and obfuscation in these prints accounts for the fact that they seem to inhabit a ghost-like space between the witnessed and the recalled, with strokes at once insistent and removed.

Installed directly opposite is “Untitled (Reinhardt)”, a significant 60”x60” homage on paper to the titled artist by Vincent Como. The work, like Reinhardts, reads as a singular black object, only this density was achieved through the methodical application of ball point pen ink (layer upon layer in two inch bands) with subtle, cruciform-shaped hue differences revealing themselves only over time. This ascetic work is impressive less in size than in the psychic mass and gravitational pull it exhibits.

Chief curator of the Guggenheim, Nancy Spector, asserts that Reinhardt’s works “recall ‘Negation Theology’, a method of thought evident in Platonism and early Christianity – employed to comprehend the Divine by indicating everything it was not.” I believe all the works in “Ace of Spades” share this inclination, if not overtly toward the spiritual, then certainly toward the dichotomies of good/evil, presence/absence and the revealed/obscured.

Leaving Sugar in a flurry of powder (in what would later be recorded as the 6th largest snowfall in NYC history), it is only in retrospect that I realize the opportuneness of this backdrop for this particular show, contrasting sweetly the delicious dark therein.

Opening Reception: January 12, 6–8pm
On view: January 13–March 5, 2011

International Print Center New York (IPCNY)
508 West 26th Street, Rm. 5A
Between 10th and 11th Avenues
New York, New York, 10001
(212) 989-5090
Tuesday through Saturday, 11–6

Opening reception: Wednesday, January 12, 1011.

12.04.10 – 01.15.11
Opening reception December 11, 6-9 pm
See my recent work at SUGAR in Bushwick

SUGAR
449 Troutman St. #3-5, bell #21
Brooklyn, NY
718.417.1180
Fri-Sun 12-6, by appointment

Paper, ink, wax
30 ft x 6.5 ft

A lower Hudson Valley landscape installed at Riverdale Country School, Bronx, NY.

2005
Paper, ink, wax
6.5 ft x 26.5 ft
Wave Hill Installation

Recurrent River is a response to the dynamic changes that the Hudson River valley has undergone, both in its human and geological histories. It is installed at WaveHill, Bronx, NY, March 5–May 30, 2005.

2004
Paper, ink, wax
108″ x 114″

Yosemite combines ideas about walking in landscape and about the human touch, in response to my art residency at Yosemite National Park in 2004-5.