Lisa Sanditz Pearl Farm Underwater II 2007 acrylic with pearl on canvas 70" x 90" x .75"
Lisa Standitz New Mall in Shoe City IV study 2007 acrylic on paper 18.75" x 25.5"
I had already started to write this blog this afternopn when I looked it up: Lisa Standitz's show at CRG has closed already. I was really surprised. Of course I'm now looking back at the ArtCal listing and see that the exhibition had been up since the end of October. But even if I didn't get to the gallery until a month after that, it still seems weird that it's no longer there: Damn, and don't I still miss having the DIA Center located just down the street, with its many-months-long installations of work which was almost always interesting on many levels.
I'm also somewhat abashed, since Sanditz's paintings on canvas and paper were among the finest I've seen this season; I would like to have been able to share my pleasure in them by sending at least a few more people over to 22nd Street with this post. If they haven't all been snatched up, maybe you can stop by the gallery and ask someone to give you a peek. The large stretched canvases were pretty spectacular, but the smaller, jewel-like works in the second room were just as amazing - and much easier to pull out off a shelf in the back.
The title of the show, "Sock City" threw me off at first since I was thinking of a regular open-air market with that name from years back. Was it the one located on a lot in SoHo next to Tower Records?
I learned however that with this body of work Standitz is continuing with her long term interest in "the various forms in which the marketplace and wilderness intersect, overlap, and inform each other", according to a very useful press release, only this time she has turned to "the Chinese commercial landscape". All of the images represent aspects of single-industry towns in China which she visited two winters back. The names of these places reflect the products they produce, and Sanditz's paintings borrow those names.
It was very, very warm in the gallery that afternoon, and I had almost decided I'd have to leave after taking only a quick look at the first room, when the various elements of these large acrylics started to coalesce, and the abstractions began to sing along with the dramatic shapes of the the buildings and landscapes they revealed.
I ended up staying for some time, and the paintings came with me when I finally left.