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Added: August 28, 2008, 2:46 pm	Share    Print    Email

"A Sea of Grinding Tectonic Plates" by Raymond Pettibon

Sag Harbor - With a discreet lime-green pennant planted outside the old Christy Building on Madison Street in Sag Harbor, (replacing last month's "For Rent" window sign), Silas Marder Gallery announces itself - a "temporary" presence at least into the fall, when Marder will decide whether to put down permanent anchor. What better exhibit to inaugurate a Sag Harbor gallery than "Sea" - paintings, drawings, sculpture, and mixed-media all evincing a nautical theme. And what more attractive port for art than two big rustic rooms of exposed brick and stone connected by brick archways.

Long a lover of Sag Harbor, Marder points out that his Bridgehampton Gallery is more an off-the road "destination," while the temporary space in Sag Harbor leads into Main Street. There are commonalities, however, between the Barn and the new gallery, which still bears the name of its former life as an antiques store (an earlier existence was as Christy's Liquor). Both spaces accommodate big work and are simple, elegant structures stunning enough to warrant comment on their own.

Marder regards the temporary gallery as a "project space" and an opportunity to show more contemporary work by local artists. Maybe down the line there will be a dialog between the galleries, pieces showing first in one space, then moving on to the other. But while both spaces present "dramatic" appearances, the Sag Harbor gallery seems particularly inviting in a calm, meditative way. Coleus and impatiens sit in brick planters in front of the building's two paned windows, open to the western light. Furnishings inside are effectively simple. The front room holds a table or two, a bench, a chair, but oh, what furniture! Designed by Kevin Walz, and built by his brother, Barry, on Shelter Island, these smooth-textured, flexible teak and carbon fiber laminate forms, with slotted cut-out designs, belie the fact that they are 10 times stronger than steel.

The front room gives ample berth to the art. Near the door a rough-hewn table serves up Mica Marder's bronze "Octopus", an attractive, tactile construction of gnarled black. Further along, Marder is seen with a playful pastel and watercolor lobster and profile drawings of open-mouthed fish. Nearby, Marc Burckhardt's "Untitled," a carefully painted acrylic and oil on wood landscape suggests tension between a primeval island in a sea and industrial pollution, the whole canvas webbed over with antique crackle lines.

The tide's clearly running to realistic design in the front room. Oliver Peterson, referencing maps of old in "Here Be Dragons (Maritime North," creates a lively, colorful collage on wood out of acrylic, floral prints, comic book illustration, nautical charts and paper fragments in various languages. Whitney Biennial prize winner Raymond Pettibon is also mingling text and image in the lithograph, "A Sea of Grinding Tectonic Plates" (couldn't have been broken any harder), using words to balance out the sweep of blue and black flecks flung up from a roiling sea.

Most representational of all, however, is Stephanie Stein, seen here with watercolors and oils, the watercolors pleasing designs of meticulously painted clipper ships adrift on ample white space (slightly mottled vellum-type paper); the oils, low-horizon seascapes that can startle, as in the case of "The Blue War," where planes are strafing the water. Moving into the back room don't miss Aurora Robson's clever and aesthetically appealing green (all senses) fish mobile constructed out of recycled bottles.

And then there's the back, which totally belongs to Cynthia Knott and her two massive horizontal, atmospheric, cylindrical landscapes on unstretched "book linen" canvas. Heavily layered with water-based paint, exposed to the elements, daubed with all manner of material, dripped, flocked, brushed, hosed, mopped, swathed - surfaces at once luminous and delicately blistered, transparent and translucent, colors bleeding through (and not), these gigantic installations "projects," as Knott calls them - "At the Horizon I" (sea) and "At the Horizon II" (sky) - command the gallery's white-washed cement block back room. The pieces are strategically lit and made to suggest prows facing away from each other but interlocked. The extensive bands, gauzy and opaque, one expressing the sea, the other, the sky, but thematically interfused with one another - sea and sky meeting at the horizon line - are suspended by white ropes that drop from the wooden ceiling beams and clamp onto the canvas with silver u-bolts.

Walk around "Horizon I" (the sea), and you're on eye level with foam sprays or a violet sunset or fathoms down, submerged and parallel to the faint trace of a haul seining boat, nets, fishes and all. In the concave of "Horizon II" it's more pastel, a flock of white birds hover over the water near the horizon line. What a fabulous new direction for Knott - more subtly tonal, more color minimalist - no more well defined separation of sea and sky. The artist says she wanted to "get off the wall." Has she ever! But do check out the beautiful leather-bound book of cut-up paintings, "pages" that could well grace any wall.

 • "Sea" will be at Silas Marder Gallery, temporary, through Sept. 7. The Gallery is located at 3 Madison Street, Sag Harbor.

Joan Baum lives in Springs and covers literature and the arts for print and radio.