In “Notes from a Painter,” Henri Matisse dreamed of an art of “purity and serenity, devoid of troubling or depressing subject matter… something like a good armchair which provides relaxation” for a businessman or a “man of letters.”

This is not that show.

Satchel Projects is pleased to present AUTHORITY PROBLEM, a group exhibition that explores notions of authority – from its meaning as “expertise” and legitimate institutional authority, to abuses of power and the role of protest in the face of the current global turn toward authoritarianism.

Artists in the exhibition include Kris Chatterson, James Esber, Jane Fine, David Humphrey, Clare Kambhu, Karmimadeebora McMillan, Mira Schor, and Peter Williams.

In a functioning democracy, authority is granted by consensus, and is regulated via a robust system of checks and balances. As this system is currently under siege in the United States, many feel torn between the need to engage and the instinct to turn away. This exhibition focuses on artists whose work doesn’t shy away from political engagement. The works in this show tangle with the subject of authority – the authority of government, of the police and military (“the authorities”), of educational institutions, and the authoritative voice of the press. Using image and text, established as well as subversive visual languages, these artists bring humor, empathy, and rage to bear on the subject.

Mira Schor‘s painted works imbue formalism with political urgency, and remind viewers that written discourse and physical form are inherently linked. In recent years she has expanded her painting practice to include direct interventions with print media, annotating/defacing/correcting articles in the New York Times. Words and images are crossed out and overwritten in a sharp critique of the Times’s equivocating and normalizing language, as is the case in New York Times Intervention: Straight to Hell.

Another of Schor’s works, a text-based painting titled This is Not Political depicts a sign that doubles as a frame, with the eponymous text written in cursive. In Schor’s words, “All art is political -- perhaps all the more so are works which do not see themselves as political -- because we’ve come to think of ‘political art’ as illustrating an overt political position. But there’s art that clearly refers to a specific political position, and art which embodies a political viewpoint without saying it in so many words and maybe whose politics are not even fully intentional on the part of the artist. This is Not Political plays on this conundrum.”

Kris Chatterson‘s paintings address a question: how can abstract language speak to political engagement? Chatterson’s abstract Post-Election and Punk Rock Poster paintings draw from the visual language of protest posters and the spirit and ethos of the punk rock movement. Abstraction-as-language conveys the spirit of punk rock’s anti-authoritarian and anti-establishment ethos and DIY raw energy. Chatterson digs into the mechanics of abstraction itself, deconstructs and reconfigures it, incorporating text, and employing dialectical painterly moves and counter-moves.

James Esber‘s Flag-Waver II reads as both an allegorical portrait and a lampoon in the tradition of Goya’s caprichos. Facial features are distorted and rearranged, the two halves of the figure bisected by a meandering yellow gap, a space for the viewer to project into. With his idiosyncratic painterly style combining loopy, expressive contour lines, cross-hatching, and intense, sometimes lurid, vignetted color, Esber combines twisty humor with critique. The flag-waver half-smiles, a hand clutching a tiny American flag. Mushrooming outgrowths swirl. Yet the expression is utterly readable – we know this person, or at least the archetype.

In David Humphrey’s Protester, the hands of the authorities drag a helpless, upside-down armless figure through a litter-strewn pictorial field in which both painterly representation and civil order seem to be in the process of breaking down. In Humphrey’s words, “Authority’s gesture, the task of the violence worker (police), is to neutralize agency, to stop a person in their tracks; to arrest their ability to move. The cop’s task is to produce and distribute violence in the name of order; but the disorder that results often serves authority’s purpose just as well by ‘proving’ the necessity for increased state violence. What kind of power can a painted image have? Like the police, a painting arrests motion, but in the service of poetic freedom. The application of an abstracting, formalized artifice can produce both a reflective distance for the viewer and an intense embodied presence that challenges detachment. A space is provided for sustained associative regard and a charged urgency.”

Karmimadeebora McMillan’s Miss Merri Mack takes its name from two sources: the Merrimack, an early iron-clad Confederate warship that famously fought the Monitor during the US Civil War, and the children’s hand-clapping rhyming game Miss Mary Mack, which originated as a Negro spiritual or Corn Ditty that was sung by slave children. McMillan’s suspended sculptural paintings are based on figurines the artist came across in her home state of North Carolina. Inside the silhouetted figures are painted images found in the Black Panther Coloring Book, a propaganda tool that was printed in 1968 as part of the FBI’s CounterIntelligence Program, used to discredit the Black Panthers in the eyes of the white population.

McMillan’s use of stereotyped figures originally meant to instill fear in Black communities is a form of reclamation. She uses these images to create a new narrative from a Black perspective, deploying conventions derived from fantasy, myth, African and African American history, science fiction, and the fantastical. Her work is informed by her background in printmaking and resultant love of paper as well as her experience growing up with her grandmothers, from whom she learned an appreciation of vernacular patterns.

In Jane Fine‘s American History X, every brushstroke seems to be an act of rebellion. A magenta lattice is the setting for a minefield of imagery: graffiti-like scrawls conceal words like NO and WTF?, fractured and charred-looking forms with barbed edges, a one-footed, triangular figure holding a spiked club and a hairy red shield that bears a defiant “X.” Red, white and blue passages are dripping, seemingly melting, contradicting the right-wing slogan “these colors don’t run.” According to Fine, “American History X was started in October and began as a joyous pink painting. It took a sudden right turn (pun intended) after the election. The very next day I was at the opening of ‘Trenton Doyle Hancock confronts Philip Guston’ at the Jewish Museum, both painters I greatly admire. The little Klan figure in my painting is an homage to both of them and directly influenced by the exhibition and Trenton's talks at the museum.”

Clare Kambhu’s Studio Art, I Can Draw a Monster is part of her “The Project of Schooling” series of observational paintings. Kambhu taught for ten years in the New York City public school system, painting interiors and objects from the classroom with frankness, as she found them. According to Kambhu, “I see them as portraits of systems. They allude to how we all move through spaces like these, and how they shape us collectively.” Like Mike Kelley’s sculptural installation Educational Complex, Kambhu’s paintings recreate and reflect on the institutional environment we all pass through. While Kelley’s sculpture took as its subject matter childhood trauma as represented via absent / forgotten “repressed” memories (which he left blank), Kambhu’s painting shows psychology folded into an art lesson, the prompt “I can draw a monster that represents a personal or societal fear” is printed on an assignment sheet. The trompe-l’oeil painting concretizes the blank assignment sheet, the text suggesting a multiplicity of context-dependent readings.

In Kambhu’s words, “The painting started with a discarded worksheet from a 9th grade lesson I taught in spring of 2016 (during the run up to the election). We talked about what zombies, vampires and other monsters might connote. The school I worked in was a public high school for recently arrived immigrants. Lots of monstrous drawings of Trump resulted from this lesson. The worksheets with “essential questions” and student writing were required by the school administration but students often tossed them aside so they could get to the art making. I saved one of the discarded worksheets and used it as the basis for this still life a few years later.”

Peter Williams’s epic painting Detroit News takes its title from the one of two major newspapers published in Detroit, where Williams lived during the 1980s and 90s. The News was a politically right-leaning paper in a city characterized by extreme racial inequality, unemployment, and a history of racial uprising. 

Created in 2019, Detroit News is structured on a central image framed by four vignetted narrative scenes. In the center of the painting, a smiling figure approaches a lit doorway at dusk, blissfully unaware he is being tailed by a car with a pig at the wheel. The pig-driver is drawn in pencil, empty and ephemeral, a negative shape. In contrast to the solidly painted central image, Williams used paint marker for the surrounding scenes, employing a mosaic-like Divisionist style. The shifting orientation of the four exterior “framing” panels creates the sensation that they are rotating on the axis of the central image, like a wheel, a process endlessly turning (notably, the city itself has a “hub and spoke” layout). The imagery in these surrounding vignettes contrasts text-based racial epithets with images of flying cars, alluding to both the Motor City and Afrofuturism, a cosmic escape to a place without baggage -- a new frontier.

For press inquiries, please contact Andrea Champlin at info@satchelprojects.com.

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