Leslie Martinez, "Give Us This Day, Our Daily Bread," 7th Floor

I can't offer a credible interpretation of these words from the book of Matthew, "give us this day, our daily bread," from which Leslie Martinez extracts the title of her exhibition. But I did spend a lot of time looking at the painting on the wall opposite from the other work, at the top of which sits a watermelon—a watermelon which is not one, because it is also teeth, or a hole, or a shiny unnamable prize. And it seems like a plausible reading of the work to see this shiny prize metaphorically, to see it as both the daily bread and the daily work in which Ms. Martinez is engaged. In this way, her work speaks of a kind of commitment, attention and care that is hard to ignore.

You get what I mean? 

I doubt very many artists at Cooper would find the source of their exhibition title in the bible, and I know I would find enough reasons not to go there. (First of all, my only copy of the bible is called the "Student Edition.")  But she goes there. And the work goes there, too. Fearlessly. To throw a few adjectives at it, the work is narrative, elaborate, painstaking. It's illustrative. Compositionally, much of the work reminds me of Mark Alan Stamaty's "Who Needs Donuts?" in its cluttered masses of figures and shapes. I don't mean that negatively, as to lower it to the level of a children's book—as if the "level of a children's book" or of "Donut's" were lower— but some might see it as such, and see the work as such.

I don't think it can be ignored that the 7^th floor lobby poses a few problems as an exhibition space, in part because the artist has to battle with John Hejduk's columns and Louise Nevelson's anniversary present, but also because of windows, outlets, strange lighting, size, and other irritating distractions. I think those distractions really take away from the work here but I also can't think of where else the work might go in this building. Certainly the show would feel sparse in the Houghton Gallery, and I've heard the argument about this work that it needs to be very tightly packed. I may just like sparse shows (see: La Mama Gallery) but I'm also skeptical of that argument. How tightly packed do they need to be? Space, and less distractions, might allow the work to breathe in a way that the 7th floor lobby doesn't afford.

Henry