Departures and Returns at WINDOW: WINDOW, 91 Walker Street New York, NY (corner of Walker and Lafayette Street)

The summer group exhibition at WINDOW brings together works by six artists to investigate psychological undercurrents within the topic of landscapes. Featuring works by Will Boone, Scott Covert, Eliot Greenwald, JJ Manford, Omar Velazquez, and Matthew Weinstein.

Eliot Greenwald presents a vivid twilight scene that teeters between the familiar and alien. Illuminated by twin moons, dueling vehicles blaze through an oasis of psychedelic plant life toward a glowing horizon. The teardrop shape of the canvas creates a vignette effect, adding emotional intensity. Scott Covert’s painterly frottage is layered with names and epitaphs collected from the gravestones of deceased filmmakers. Through a devoted collector-like process, Covert collapses time and geography to create an orgy of industry bedfellows in a single work, from Agnes Varda to Billy Wilder, from John Cassavetes to Cecil B. DeMille. 

JJ Manford’s interior painting echoes the format of the glass enclosed exhibition space while transporting the viewer to the countryside, with a view looking over a tree lined creek. Details such as a framed poster of Bonnard’s Dipping Path and a kitsch giraffe vase set a nostalgic mood. A worn-in armchair and an old telephone at its foot evoke memories of an absent presence. In the foreground of Omar Velazquez's surrealistic Caribbean landscape, we are confronted with a stacked formation of a vulture perched upon a carved stone head, balanced on the back of a sea turtle. This mysterious apparition hovers weightlessly above an expanse of brown water and green hills, which in the thick atmosphere resemble a crowd of faces. Together these elements could be read as a coded monument, or a harbinger of an impending event. 

In Matthew Weinstein’s Cerulean Sky Over the Moyenne Corniche, the artist conjures sense memories of a past summer bike ride through Nice. Acknowledging the impossibility of capturing nature by pictorial means, the image is an impression or afterimage on the eyelids after looking up at the sun. The overall effect of the staccato brush marks convey the haziness of recollection while offering a meditation on what we take with us from our fondest memories. Will Boone’s tableaux of three painted bronze sculptures alludes to the mythological Western landscape. The hazards symbolized by the San Pedro cactus, wild dog, and sun-bleached tiger skull are subverted by their candy-like enamel finishes, recalling oversized toy figurines from childhood or roadside attractions one might encounter on a family road trip through the Texas desert.