Ryan

New York State, 1970 seems to be an amusing portrayal of “reality,” since a real arm is holding a picture of a real boat against the horizon line in a position mimicking the place a ship would really float. The arm stretched over water calls forth confidence that an actual person is reaching over a railing on the edge of land or on a boat. Black, white, and gray color values and the rectangular shape of the images are elements that tap into viewers’ familiarity with photographs.

This little wood figure has red spots on his face, neck, hands, feet, and on his round mouse ears. Even though Measle Mouse is small―just two feet tall―he has powerful-looking shoulders and is wearing an impressive blue outfit as if suited up for a sport or a performance or an important task.

Juan Sánchez photographed this “moment in the street” when his friends’ children paused with their flowers and bicycle. The girls in front are smiling openly; the taller girl in back looks solemn and somewhat protective with her hands on the others’ shoulders.

José Clemente Orozco created La retaguardia, or The Rear Guard, in 1929. Though Orozco painted many murals, he was also a renowned printmaker. The Rear Guard is a black-and-white print created using lithography, a printmaking method that uses limestone blocks or aluminum plates to transfer ink drawings to a sheet of paper.

The “pond tokens” in this lithograph are treasures the artist has discerned from close looking at a watery scene. John Colt was not interested in exploring large vistas; rather, he said he liked the “little areas—little realms of experience, nature close up,” and his title for this work demonstrates that he liked to look at what most represented, or was a token, of one of these sites.

Requiem/Let Them Rest by Joan Snyder is an arresting mix of color and text. If a person were to walk by this image tagged on a wall full of graffiti, the jarring hues and the blaring word Requiem might call for a closer look.

Only three feet tall, untitled, C.H.F. is a bulbous little chair whose underlying metal frame is wrapped with thick skeins of tightly knotted brown paper twisted around encircling segments of chicken wire. The ropy paper skeins twine along the chair skeleton with organic energy, like vines enveloping a tree trunk, highlighting and distorting the geometry of the angular lawn chair.

Some kind of trouble may have happened to someone named Jim. One of his eyes is black and larger than the other. His nose looks swollen. Questions arise. How did Jim get this black eye? Was Jim picked on, or has he picked on someone else and started a fight? Was the conflict really necessary or could it have been avoided?

Janet Fish presents one of these moments in her pastel Sasha with a Bowl of Candy. An adolescent girl hunches over a wooden surface, perhaps a table or a desk, her forearms spread across the surface from nearly one side of the composition to the other, her chin resting on the back of overlapped hands.

Jane Hammond’s painting Irregular Plural II inspires a complex “reading.” The canvas, shaped like an enormous book with scalloped end sheets and gilt edging, is filled with colorful images that hint at a multitude of stories.