Beauty Underfoot at Smack Mellon


(Photo: Yumi Janairo Roth, Paleta: Pallet (Made in Philippines) (2005), 3 pallets (46x40x6)

According to Smack Mellon’s press release, the title of the group exhibit, Beauty Underfoot comes from John Cage— apropos of Robert Rauschenberg, “Beauty is now underfoot wherever we take the trouble to look.” This aesthetic is precisely followed by Jeanne Gerrity, curator.

Yumi Janairo Roth recontextualizes shipping pallets, objects so commonplace, so functional— they are almost invisible. Roth, however, builds them herself, and then embellishes them with hand carved designs, or inlays them with mother-of-pearl. Much of the technique she employs in Paleta: Pallet (Made in the U.S.A.), she learned while participating in a residency in the Philippines. Not rough hewn and thrown out with the trash; the pallets, in this exhibit, are defiantly elegant.

In Charwei Tsai’s video installation, a fish, projected on an artificial beach of the gallery floor, struggles to breathe, as the artist paints calligraphy on its belly. There is a tension created by the undeniable beauty of the image— the sand sparkles; crystalline and pure. It’s hauntingly ephemeral. This is contrasted with the fish; desperate to escape. It seems to be trying to move off the page.

Hood, by Fawad Khan, is the result of his first foray into integrating digital media and wall painting. His large scale painting of a car, cartoonish and joyful, shimmies and shakes with real time animation. Yet for all its playfulness, there is a not quite hidden malice, something tricky and deceitful: this could blow up in your face at any time.

All of the work in this exhibit also seems to reference, in spirit, the much larger exhibit at The New Museum, Generational:Younger Than Jesus— artists responding to a culture that is beset and besieged by images, by content. A world exploding with information. The work is performative, narrative. It is brash. Fearless. While not every piece in Beauty Underfoot succeeds— every voice is clear.

The exhibit runs from June 20th to August 2nd, 2009.

Smack Mellon
92 Plymouth Street (@ Washington St), Brooklyn, NY 11201
Gallery hours are Wednesday-Sunday, 12-6pm.


Today’s guest blogger, LA Slugocki is an award winning writer and producer, has lived in New York City for twenty years.