“/Līt/”, Julie Kim and Laura Lee-Georgescu on the 6th Floor Lobby

The 6th Floor exhibition this week starts with “light”, the observation or implication of light, but puts its emphasis elsewhere. Julie Kim’s photographs, drawings and installation feel much more preoccupied with architectural space, not only interacting with John Hejduk’s columns, but also adopting them as the subject of her work. Each of her seven photographs is named after the space shown in the picture, and each shows a strong light source on the building’s staircases, lobbies, and elevators. There is something impressive particularly with her large-scale drawings, and appropriate, as she pushes her drawing into the scale of the room’s architecture. This works well, but the drawings themselves don’t fit quite right. My first impression was that the manner of lighting felt very familiar, pulling these away from specificity and into what feels like more generic scenes. This may not be undesirable, but doesn’t make as much sense paired with Julie’s sensitivity of touch and the commitment to observation that these drawings imply.

Julie’s drawings also speak, in some instances, in oddly graphic or architectural terms, forcing planes and hard edges that complicate the organic nature of light and shadows. This occurs in Laura’s work as well, where hard forms hesitantly structure the organic forms of her paintings. A dark, graphic corner obstructs “Aqua” and a similar strategy is used in the corners of “High Altitude.”

But this issue in Laura’s work, the hard edge imposed over the organic, has more to do with the problem of resolving an image than about a graphic or architectural concern. Laura’s paintings seem driven by a process of staining that is both incredibly spontaneous and also strangely confining. How to work over the delicate and graceful spill? These paintings, which have powerful moments, feel at pains not to disrupt those moments at the expense of the whole work. Her painting, “ Yellow Room” escapes this problem in a way that is not entirely easy to pinpoint why. Perhaps at its somewhat smaller scale, the amount of paint, and the scale of the forms, feel more complete. It also has a strong structure, bisected horizontally by a line underneath the cotton.

Some of the more successful moments come when the paintings reference something naturalistic, sky or clouds. Laura may have had this in mind with her title, “High Altitude.” The work also has an occasional reference to photography which feels intentional. These paintings feel like they are moving in a direction and are at an interesting but incomplete stage.

Henry