Joe Bradley: Vom Abend brooklynrail.org - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from brooklynrail.org Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Walking through Vom Abend, Joe Bradley’s new show at David Zwirner in Chelsea, gave me the sense I was traipsing through heady conversations and the pulsation of music, following wisps of smoke with my nose like a cartoon character.
Science fiction is largely a projection of our own fears about ourselves, and in these two exhibitions of graphic works and several choice sculptures, Bhabha plays with the struggle to enter into the minds of our ancestors, as well as the unpleasant acknowledgement of a creepy pseudo-fascism or impulse to domination that seems to inhere in a great deal of archaic art.
It’s not hard, gazing at the photographs James Welling has assembled in Thought Objects, to picture their creator holding a paintbrush rather than a camera. The show’s standout work is a striking combination of seascape, screenprint overlay, and abstract coloration whose stippled, almost woody texture defies formal categorization.
When James Welling gets deeply involved in a project, he sees the subjects he’s interested in everywhere. His current body of work, Thought Objects, emphasizes textured surfaces. Some of his subjects include flowers, Brutalist architecture, a blue door in Paris, a sculpture table in Guilford, but his photographs do much more than convey subject matter, they open out into fields of metaphor and analogy.