Questions of intent and meaning loom palpably over a pair of exhibitions at Second Street Gallery: Josh Dorman’s “how strange it is to be anything at all” and “Dirty Mirror” by fiber artists Dance Doyle and Caitlin McCormack. Both shows invite extended scrutiny because the artists take unconventional approaches to their chosen forms of expression. Expect to have long looks, but be aware that conclusions may vary: Prepare to be confounded or frustrated or fascinated or delighted—or all of the above.
On the walls of Second Street’s main space, Dorman helpfully admits the open-ended intent of his art, yet he lays his muse bare from the get-go anyway: the 1998 record In the Aeroplane Over the Sea by Neutral Milk Hotel. He says that his complex explosive dreamscapes are a “response and homage” to the album and “derive a poetic inspiration” from its “language and internal logic.” Dorman himself—and indeed, a consensus across the internet—believes that the words of the band’s visionary Jeff Magnum are beyond any rational explanation. Where does that leave us?
If that squirrelly meaning best defines the indie rock influence for his work, it’s admittedly difficult to draw direct parallels to the Neutral Milk Hotel songs beyond the borrowed titles and lyrical phrases. At least for me it is, since my familiarity with the group pretty much begins and ends in knowing it’s the favorite band of April Ludgate from “Parks and Recreation.
No matter, though, because there’s a great deal to digest and decipher. In a way, Dorman’s shiny resin-coated ink, acrylic, and antique paper on wood panels are reminiscent of the nightmare fauna in Hieronymus Bosch’s “The Garden of Earthly Delights.” Faceless human busts lurk, headless animals and beasts hewn of later industrial age debris plunge ass-over-head into waterfalls, helplessly ride conveyor belts, and foolishly climb precarious cliffs. They navigate worlds with opaque perspectives: a pastiche of landscapes folding upon themselves with blueprint guidelines tussling for space against mountain crags while classical columns hover over railway bridges.
Dorman’s most uniquely effective device is his use of depth. What might function as a decorative gimmick in a lesser artist’s hands provides one of the strongest arguments to visit Second Street to see these works in person, as two-dimensional photos fail to capture them. Some employ an inward layering of resin to form swirling wave pools, active insect nests, or in “Villa of the Mysteries” (2018), a flesh-eating cauldron rife with capillary-like root growth. His mix of painting with collage reflects a mind at play—in “Excavating Babel” (2020), Dorman recasts the scissored relics of aged book illustrations into a city of no particular century, pointing its mismatched spires into the nebulous belly of an improbable sky. Psychedelic, sure. But there’s more than simple trippiness here. The problem—or the solution, maybe—is that any kind of narrative will likely only reveal itself to the individual. Like hundreds of Rorschach tests exposed at once, each piece defies you to focus.
More uneven cityscapes await in Second Street’s intimate Dové Gallery, where Doyle and McCormack trade tapestries and cushions. That’s not a putdown, because for all the textile in the space, the products of their handiwork are not what anyone would sanely call comforting.
Textile art rarely trades in urban grit as thoroughly as Doyle does here, with figures striding atop strata of subterranean profundity that is home to a bestiary of surprising beings engulfed in murky topographies. Angry sexuality pops out in the nude flipping us the bird in “Six Feet High” (2018). Others construct hazier moods and dare us to trust our eyes. An outsized female treads upon a sewer grate that leads into a striped-horizon fantasy world, while in “The Witness” (2017), a face lords over high rises and under a graffiti tag-style rendering of the word “SEEN,” while further below, a rift unearths deep space and a passing satellite. “Ebbflow” (2015) features a shadow crossing a starry field, but beneath it, another time and/or another location is let loose.
The deliberately irregular shapes of the tapestries themselves are creations as personal as the artist’s relationship with urban life. And a second connection to Dorman emerges in the difficulty of determining our point of view: Here, too, staking out temporal and geographic assurance is a bitch.
McCormack, Doyle’s show partner, brings an ironic hand to crocheted bird skeletons (“Thicket I & II,” 2020, “Swim Team,” 2021) and lusty westerners (“Libidinous Drifter,” 2021), as well as smirkingly provocative textual pieces like “You Know He Told Everyone” (2021), a banner proclaiming “Edging” (“Modesty Blanket,” 2021), and a pillow topped by a handgun appliqué (“Sweet Dreams,” 2021). McCormack’s works encourage speculation like good gossip; the phrases concoct a humorous, sinister theme that carries the immediate intrigue of overhearing a single line of a passerby fighting with someone on the phone. And as far as stitched pillow messages go, ”Live, Laugh, Love” this ain’t.
“how strange it is to be anything at all” Josh Dorman
& “Dirty Mirror” Dance Doyle and Caitlin McCormack
Second Street Gallery
Through November 19
