It is also significant that McLaughlin's untitled works were hand-painted within meditative states. Wagner's art shares in this poetic gentility more than in Edward Kienholz' political rage or George Herms' urban guerilla aesthetic. King's work relates most directly to the exhibition title and must be singled out. An evocative tension is maintained between the finely crafted realist images of, say, sunsets or waterlily ponds, and painterly abstractions that balance discordant color with unexpected gesture. Edenic idealism meets the ruptures of Modernism.
Hope emerges from memory and loss.
King also does large works involving multiple canvases in fractured abstractions taken from highway signage. The staccato graphics of roadways are broken into Ellsworth Kelly-like compositions, then reassembled to point to notations on the human presence in the landscape. James Fee makes beautifully enigmatic photographs. The subject of his new pictures is New York. Images, including one of the Empire State building poking its way out of a blur of trees, represent the city as a static entity full of precious views.