"Inner Yonder," Amelia Hall on the 7th Floor Lobby

One recurring question for me during this week’s 7th Floor show was, is being childlike the same as being naïve, and what can work that is deliberately naïve have to say today? I don’t mean this as a roundabout attack. The work seemed to be about imagination, and the mark making, the color choices, and the subject matter speak to a child-like imagination. Maybe whether that becomes naïve, or is intentionally naïve, is a difficult question to answer. Being “naïve,” the dictionary tells me, is “having or showing unaffected simplicity of nature” and “unsophisticated.” It also means having an “unaffectedly direct style reflecting little or no formal training or technique.” Perhaps the work seeks this out earnestly, or uses it as a strategy to say something, and in either case it’s a choice. Does this choice assert a particular kind of temperament or sense of humor?

In her drawing under the two 7th floor windows, Amelia has synthesized the object quality of some of her prints with the environments she creates in her drawings, so that the drawing, in a variety of textures, makes this invented environment an object itself suspended in the space of the page. Only a very small rabbit on the left hand side seems to imply that there is a ground outside of the sidewalk in front of the building. For me, this is emblematic of the sense of humor in the work. The rabbit—insignificant, cute—grounds the work.

In the framed drawing of a Victorian-type house, Amelia has made a picture of a fairly familiar kind of house in a very direct way, seemingly from imagination. This is the first piece that convinced me of the pursuit of a child-like imagination (the title, “Inner Yonder,” itself a kind of quirky title, speaks to the fantasy lands of the mind). The immediacy, sloppiness, quality of mark making also bring me into that space. In the drawing under the window, the play of competing textures and shapes makes the piece more compelling, and this drawing could use more of an exploration of that imagined space, if at the expense of immediacy.

Environments are interspersed with images of equally fantastical (but still attached to a kind of Victorian aesthetic) objects. These objects are luxury items, invented jewelry as in the case of the five small watercolors with collaged magazine cutouts and drawing. They operate, like everything here, on a very particular internal logic. The two black and white etched gems are the only pieces in the show that don’t seem made from an internal place, but are physical and weighted.

Some of the work might benefit from more physical presence. The playfulness might feel fuller in more concrete form. Some of the work is so faint that one can barely see it, like the green colored-pencil drawing of gems, which almost disappear into the paper. What could be a sort of gentle, prodding humor runs the risk of coming across as non-committal or too nonconfrontational. Perhaps it’s difficult for me to decipher what this kind of imagination, deliberately naïve or naïve at all, says, and maybe that comes down to the question of aggressiveness or lack of aggressiveness in form. If the work wants to baroque, maybe it needs to be more baroque?

Still, the gold painted window felt like a nice demonstration of the thinking happening in this show. The luxury of a gold, ornamental frame around the window contrasted with how it’s painted, I think in gold paint (opposed to gold leaf) and painted with immediacy.

Henry