Familiar art movements: Abstract Expressionism, Surrealism, and American Realism are all back in the New York Art World, but in tidier packages. Maybe I'm going to the wrong galleries, but I rarely see any experimentation in how a show is hung anymore. So it's great to see Sharon Butler's show at Furnace Art on Paper in Falls Village, a quiet spot in an increasingly lively part of Connecticut.

The gallery's owner, Kathleen Kucka, is an exciting artist and open to new approaches.

Butler uses the familiar shapes of Early Modernism—rectilinear, triangle,spots—as her subject. But she has always questioned every part of formal abstraction. How the work is mounted, the stretcher bars, the canvas, the frame—every aspect is reformable.

In this show, the given that is being challenged is the presentation. How do you hang a show?

Small, unframed watercolors hang on clamps and chains from three black metal-wheeled clothes hangers similar to those in museum coat check rooms for holding bags and coats. Familiar objects hang next to them: a potato masher with a squiggly metal press and black plastic handle, a used hand truck has a delicate piece hanging by large circular chains from its handle, and objects from the kitchen and the studio: a mug, a stapler, a colander.

The artist's making double-sided pieces originally motivated the unmooring of the work from the wall. These have been contained in Perspex sleeves that allow you to see studies on both sides of the paper. They jut out perpendicularly, like hospital signs meant to designate room ordinances.

From there, she began to imagine multiple ways of seeing the work from different viewing points, eventually hanging them and placing them on moving carts.

It's as if El Lissitzky's sketchbook is scattering shapes. They fall like blossoms in new ways and new colors. In connection with a surface, they disrupt or dissolve. Or blend with something that was there before.

As I walked away from the gallery the first time, I imagined I could see the pieces suspended in a frozen vortex without the walls, the objects, or the trolleys. It reminded me of a camera technique from the late '90s that became a staple of martial arts movies: the players would leap into the air and stay there while the camera was free to move around them. I felt like Neo waking in the Matrix.

Perhaps I was light headed because the way art is exhibited in a gallery is usually so fixed. This arrangement is so unfamiliar. The pieces are small rectangles with perhaps a patch of color—spots of color that have been used to monoprint another piece—or a single-stroke pencil- drawn triangle. They have a Paul Klee feel, although even lighter and less definite. They're beautiful in a way that makes choosing one over another very difficult.

Just as they are Casualist, they are equally Causalist. Each action precipitates another effect. The values change when there is water on the surface of the paper. All of a sudden, geometrics are not stable. Pencil lines can create space or limit it. A brush with open separated tines traces a swathe of green across the paper. But the old art adage of doing something, doing something to it, and so on has led to dissipation. Are they falling apart or is their evanescence due to their reaching for transcendence through revelation?

Either way, their fugaciousness is contrasted with the lumpen solidity of the objects and the trolleys. There is Surrealist poetry to the use of everyday objects. The watercolors act like the formal aspects of poetry—syntax, meter, and scan. The objects are verbs/nouns, things that do things. The dots in the colanders, the hole punch, and the curving handle of a staple gun are part of the associations. However, they are doubly redundant; they have not helped to make the artworks, and they can no longer do their jobs.

Sharon Butler's work is familiar, and perhaps a return to art styles that once worked is happening because a moment of reconsideration is needed.

It could work, but only if the questions and the motivation for asking them are as new as they are.Description goes here

Millree Hughes, June 24, 2024

In the long slow summer of 2020 Kathleen Kucka, artist and former curator of the Shirley Fiterman Art Center at the Borough of Manhattan Community College, headed up to her 1850s country barn in Falls Village, Connecticut to make large scale works that would have been impossible for her in the city. During that time she discovered a unique building in the center of Falls Village that seemed to be lying fallow: A former post office, town hall, plumbing shop, and grocery store, this edifice was a bank just prior to the town acquiring it in the early 1960s. Twenty years ago, the Canaan Board of Selectmen began renting spaces on the first-floor to artists for their studios. Kucka saw a unique opportunity to bring artists she admired in the city to her own doorstep and in the process add life to her Connecticut community. An introduction to the powers that be led to a meeting with the town council, and before she knew it, she had herself a gallery.

Furnace – Art on Paper Archive is pleased to present Hermine Ford: Normally Invisible, featuring new paintings and works on paper, May 7 – June 12. The opening reception for the artist is Saturday, May 7 from 4:00 – 6:00pm.

Inspired by ancient mosaics, Ford creates shaped canvases and works on paper that reflect some of the timeless imagery she has gathered on her travels. Especially her visits to Rome and her interest in the layering of historic remnants created by past civilizations that have fueled her work for decades.

In Normally Invisible, three shaped canvases are shown in context with a selection of works on paper, highlighting the lively exchange between the two mediums.

The works on paper are unique with splashes of color and spontaneous energy. They stand in contrast to the shaped canvases whose forms evoke shards of broken tile and establish a fractured space. Ford’s paintings present like objects, found or discarded, with dashes of vibrant color and exuding an inner glow.

Furnace – Art on Paper Archive

107 Main St., Falls Village

As the daughter of first-generation Abstract Expressionist Jack Tworkov, Hermine Ford grew up immersed in the counterculture of Abstract Expression and spent her childhood surrounded by her father’s inner circle of influential American painters including William de Kooning and Robert Rauschenberg. With such a significant upbringing, Ford was almost fated to be a painter, despite a natural desire to set herself apart from the strong male figures in her life.

Eventually and courageously, she gave into destiny and began a longstanding career as an artist in her own right, developing a singular style of painting that examines materiality of the natural and built environment through colorful perforated patterns that combine formal abstraction with technical drafting.

A current solo exhibition of her work, Normally Invisible, on view at Furnace - Art on Paper Archive in Falls Village, CT, presents an intimate selection of works on paper and shaped canvases that highlight the meticulous process and complex concepts behind her well-regarded works.