WORKNOT. Who doesn’t like the sound of that, apart from feudal lords and corporate management? SPACE Gallery offers you the opportunity to cast off the shackles of reporting for duty and listening to water-cooler drivel in exchange for a few succinct statements regarding deeper folds of existence beyond the dictates of the alarm clock. Bear in mind the visual aspect of WORKNOT is only part of a larger annual bonanza of music and theater so there’s plenty of reasons for repeat visits.

Of the five artists featured, Erin Rosenthal emphasizes the mystical mandates of the show. Her most developed piece on display is “The Happiness of Trees” which favors the veiled mysteries of the natural world. Rather than the marketing-oriented graphics often associated with screen-printing, this is a completed work that resonates with the soul while taking full advantage of the medium. A screen-print landscape is composed of vibrant blue, green, and pink forms flattened for an iconographic effect that adds a religious depth to sentient happy trees that would make Bob Ross lose his shit.

Sara Crall has by far the most official-looking collection of paintings in the WORKNOT entourage. Small- and medium-scale works on board line an entire wall of the space. Her palette is muted, works often utilizing a tannin-brown background for an antiquated-paper effect. When color is applied, the images jump out in an optic warp and woof where multiple perspectives can live together.

Crall’s style feels like a throwback to the days of Matisse, but the artist plays with too many elements for the viewer to consider the work derivative. The domestic themes featuring interior still-life do recall the modern master. Crall flattens space in a manner that calls into question the semiotics of her subjects. Objects are emptied of their substance and filled with the antique color fields of days gone by.

Crall is most effective when she keeps it simple. “Ivory Sea Sound” is a simple line rendering of a piano and lamp. “Kate’s Parts” is far more hectic but still muted with swirls and drips of aging color forming a gossamer stage for various figures to meld in and out of perception as though they are characters in a dream.

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Meanwhile, Philly puppeteer (and theatrical contributor to the overall WORKNOT event) Beth Nixon is leading by example. She addresses the themes of the show with immediate sculptural works comprised entirely of imagination. There’s no missing the LotaYata family hanging from the ceiling. A hypothetical conversation between artist-curator Colleen Kinsella and Nixon may have gone down like this:

“What do you want to do for the show in January?”

“I don’t know, maybe I’ll spend December making giant freakazoid piñatas of winged, footless, and deformed creatures with lifelike pubes.”

“Okay.”

Jungil Hong and Rover Nomad take a more didactic approach. Rhode Islander Hong’s “Miami Haze” is a giant work of screen-printed paper collage on board. It’s hard to avoid feeling disturbed by a catastrophic rising sun of fanned-out rifles spewing flames over a landscape of clear-cut forest, but the artist brings a spiritual message of regeneration coupled with the devastation. Roots of the tree stumps, made visible by the artist in a mirror image of the visible world, are sprouting leaves and flowers. The fish-scale technique of paper collage gives a decidedly eastern approach to the style, emphasizing a Buddhist concept of the universe as a lotus flower perpetually blossoming from itself.

Rover Nomad is the granddaddy of the bunch, and his teaching methods come from good ol’-fashioned words. The New Yorker and friend of William Burroughs is showing never-before-seen paintings of acrylic and collage on masonite from the late '70s. Simple images of all-American-looking bowlers exist in simple bright color fields. Words are pasted together like a ransom note to form sage communications. Judging from punctuation discrepancies, these words from on high are combinatory revelations from disparate sources. A sample excerpt:

“great cultures and civilizations loom up, and they contain redundancy they do things without knowing why they do them. more often one’s life becomes a desert and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.”

In other words, be the underground flowers and leaves, avoid the desert life, and WORKNOT.

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Ian Paige: ianpaige@gmail.com