Sub-Rural #62, Whitney Claflin at Green Gallery

Whitney Claflin’s current Milwaukee exhibition “The Shops at Atlas Park”  breeds aesthetics with merchandizing at the Green Gallery’s uniquely panoramic space on Farwell St. Her variously sized works ironically named after a mixed outdoor retail park in Queens, presents a more transitory pictorial agenda than her recent exhibition at MOMA, PS 1., which included semblances of DIY Arte Povera and Fluxus wild-life. While numerous two-dimensional pieces here affect landscape fragments as well as fluid, abstract expressionist quotations “The Shops” and the implied subject of consumerism parody appetizing top shelf products in miscellaneous stages of stylistic representation/possession. Figurative and literal, digital and analog popular culture regale her and are translated with the aura of second-hand boutique treasure, street vendor tchotchkes, and hollow megastore inventory.

Whitney Claflin, Green Gallery, Installation View

Claflin’s show is made up of primarily modest sized works with key fragments jostling for position in a decidedly outre hierarchy. The paintings are on the periphery of narrative or at least textual. Content is the mixture of current favorite clothing, musical tracks, and studio routines, filtered through art historical references, the array of pictures feeling like a fortuitous collection rather than a critical body.  The artist casually surveys stores in her neighborhood and whether she is consciously apprising the 19^th century flâneur model her pictorial assessment of urban space as a deconstruction of gendered cultural authority becomes a relevant subtext.

“The Shops” paintings have revolving formal motifs –  abstraction, landscape, and figuration. They’re contextualized by surrealism, conceptualism, neo-realism, materialism, and vernacularism, –  some with 2 or 3 descriptors that collect and modify Claflin’s sentiments and inspirations, seeking lyrics. “Past the Dunes,” for example, isn’t just a nimble seascape with Fairfield Porter fingerprints. It’s  mellifluous dawn-on-the-cape nostalgia with the perfect amount of regret drifting across cyan tidewater.

“Avril Urlab” is a red hot, similarly-sized, formally opposite abstraction thriving between strata of molten rock. Embers scribbled beneath decaying architecture drive drawing and torturous cipher trails to extremes. Both paintings are literature about picture making – one trance-like, another a netherworld from which the beast slouches towards Bethlehem.

“Better Hands” puns on the sweet confection of a soon to be ruptured cumulus sky. Sinuous weather threatens chaos when warm vs. cool temperatures open anxious veins just beneath the horizon.

Works like “Painting for Liz McGraw” and “Forever Painting” debate ways to finish  compositions, flirting with, but stopping short of, painterliness, color field, or hard-edge brushwork. Claflin finds the most unruffled way to search the perimeters of abstraction, tinker with narrative, and trifle with formalism. The show’s litany of gestures and visual prompts rest in a virtual mosaic stretched across the gallery in a pattern that morphs mid century and contemporary sensibilities deep into the anti-archaeological.