Halsey McKay Presents Two Shows: Hedge and Various Positions

This month, Halsey McKay in East Hampton, NY is presenting a show of David Kennedy Cutler and Monsieur Zohore as well as Janis Provisor. On view through August 30, Cutler and Zohore’s latest multimedia pieces come together in the presentation “Hedge,” while “Various Positions” is Provisor’s first solo show with the gallery and features new paintings.

The story of “Hedge,” an investigation into shared materials and motifs in the practices of Zohore and Cutler, can be traced back to 2018, when the pair became correspondents out of admiration for one another’s work. Today, their first-ever collaboration calls on years of virtual exchange to create a bright and playful space that toys with notions of interior and exterior, public and private, subverting the expected in a landscape of cages, trellises, vases, and sprouting greenery.

Their collages have a certain poetic dialogue of an almost-domestic nature, suggesting practices of class-based labor to which both artists allude. Cutler’s works spring to life from the canvases, built from a process of inkjet transfers, pasting, and painting. Rib cages and Lysol containers are buried beneath sprouting leaves and blooming sunflowers, extending away from the confines of their backdrops. Ensemble looks like a snapshot of a plant nursery.

From Zohore, visual essays come to life through collaged assemblages of paper towels, inkjet, and bleach, where dreamlike narratives have been built from the imagery of pop culture and art history, seen in works like The Gerber Baby Growup Plan and Van Gogh Scissor Hands.

Colorful blooms have been placed around the gallery space in vessels that appear less-than nourishing, different iterations of a similar concept being imagined by each artist. Zohore’s bottles of blue cleaning liquid are a curious choice for lively Birds of Paradise blooms, while split vases made from cage-like stays and zippers have been crafted hand by Cutler, who has filled them with pink or spiky purple petals.

Also on view, the gallery is presenting the newest of Provisor’s paintings on linen in “Various Positions.” Watercolor and water-based oil paints appear slick on the surfaces of the artist’s compositions, which she considers to be autobiographical. Conservatively and thoughtfully placed patches and markings of various colors, faintly familiar geometric blocks, and squiggly gestures suggest imagery that is just out of the viewer’s grasp—though the abstractions have been said to represent the artist’s emotions, desires, and realities.