A Cloth Over a Birdcage at Chateau Shatto

Instability, a globe like ours, resting
on a pedestal of vacuum, a ping-pong ball…
-John Ashbery, “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror”

In the case of painting, restrictions may allow for a lot. A small painting is free from monumental pressures; an artist’s hand looms confidently over their blank little territory. Chateau Shatto’s current exhibition A Cloth Over a Birdcage, celebates limitation, with no more than a few works exceeding twenty inches in size. Rising art-world stars Lauren Satlowski and Brook Hsu are shown alongside Surrealist giant Gertrude Abercrombie, famed for her tiny, peephole paintings. As little as possible, Issy Wood’s Joan Rivers portraits are devotional, like a limited edition postage stamp. Harnessing the “gravitational pull of locket-size images,” the exhibition presents paintings that must be viewed differently, like an amoeba in a microscope (Ross Bleckner’s Untitled), or forest prey through night-vision googles (Brook Hsu’s fade out 1.)  A Cloth Over a Birdcage is on view until September 7th at Chateau Shatto. -CM