It's amazing what a difference a day makes. I was going to write about Coady Brown's curatorial work in Domesticated, a group show organized with and at Richard Heller Gallery, but I'm happy I didn't because it would have been the wrong expression. A day can change your whole perspective on a show, and the more I look at Brown's show, the more it spoke to this balance of feral and being settled, what perhaps we all wanted in a bit of desire to get out of our homes at the end of the year almost now feels like a comfortable retreat back to our fortresses.
"Domestication typically refers to what has been tamed, shaped, or reformed by human hands," Brown says of the concept of her show. "That what was once wild has become more manageable and subdued in its new environment or state. Contrarily however, this show explores the domestic as a space of upheaval, invention, transformation, and the uncanny. How when something is taken out of its “natural” state, somehow things get perverted along the way, regurgitated into something bizarre and unexpected."
This is a fascinating way to look at the year that was and the year that its shaping up to be, albeit only a few days into 2021. We spent a lot of time in our homes this year, maybe more than we would ever want, and new details and observations would alternate between maximum sharpness and detached abstration. I'm not an artist, but I would assume this is much like the process of painting in a studio alone. As a writer, I teeter on that balance of transformation, but that actual figurative or abstract movement from mind to hand to painting surface is something else. What Brown has done here is tackle those elements of abstration and clarity and as she says, "fantasy." The artists in the show, Coady, Raul De Lara, Alexander Harrison, Brook Hsu, GaHee Park and Jose de Jesus Rodriguez are all different kind of makers, but have a poignant focus of what domestication can potentially mean.
"Through figuration, interior spaces, and objects, this show looks closely at how the domestic can become a place of fantasy, vulnerability, and transformation," Brown writes. Each artists’ work deals with these concepts uniquely, stretching limitations into new possibilities. —Evan Pricco