Rachel L Bedder: “Cat, Stick, Easel, Moon”
Eyelid movies that you can walk through in a room as comfortable as a day-sleeping sofa
A good gallerist arranges bodies in space as surely as she arrays pictures on the wall. Through visual cues and the strategic use (or non-use) of lighting, she’ll let you know how close to the art you ought to get. At many galleries on the other side of the river, you’re often encouraged to step back from the art as if you’re social distancing from it.
That’s not necessarily a poor or undemocratic choice. It may suit the show perfectly. Some exhibitions are best approached as if we’re watching them unfold on a movie screen. The work is aligned on one plane and the perceiving eyes array themselves on another. The vectors don’t intersect, and they aren’t meant to.
Then there are places like SMUSH (340 Summit Ave.) The gallery is too small for there to be much distance between the see-er and what she’s seeing. But even if the operation moved to a much bigger place, gallerist Katelyn Halpern would still be disposed toward plane-breaking. Halpern is a dancer and she wants her visitors to move around freely. Shows at SMUSH are often as immersive as a ball pit at a birthday party. Landmark SMUSH exhibitions — Buttered Roll’s brilliant deconstruction of Colombian founding father Simón Bólivar, Christian Gallo’s febrile street photography, the Earth Temple, Halpern’s own “Disaster Place” — are meant to be inhaled.
“Cat, Stick, Easel, Moon,” a show of new work by the UK-born painter Rachel L Bedder, continues in that tradition. Heck, that’s underselling it: it’s the most radical act of visual plane disruption that SMUSH has ever done. Bedder and Halpern mean to set you adrift inside the dreaming mind of the show’s main character. No matter where you stand in the little gallery, you’ll see figures, colors and shapes reoccur: landscape markers, geological features, objects laden with symbolism. Sometimes they’re close up, sometimes they’re far away, and sometimes, it’s tough to tell where they are relative to where you are.
This deliberate act of unmooring is part of the excitement of the show. Nevertheless, “Cat, Stick, Easel, Moon” is not an extraterrestrial excursion. Weird as it can be, it feels domestic. These paintings suggest stills captured from the mind of a person who has dozed off with household objects surrounding her. They’ve fallen through the porous membrane of everyday life and embedded themselves in her unconscious. Thus the show plays as an aggregate portrait of a person captured from the inside. She isn’t depicted. She doesn’t have to be.
What do we know about her? Well, for starters, she probably has a feline companion. It’s an ornery little thing, but charismatic in its way, and it has, as cats do, slipped directly into her reverie. This furry beast is capable of taking on several shapes at once. In some of the pieces, she’s as spindly as a phasmid; in others, she’s curled up in a cat-circle and ascended to the sky to become the moon. Her face is sometimes flat, pinched, and detachable, as if it’s meant to be pulled off like a mask. In “Three Bodies, Nine Lives,” one cat-mask lies discarded on desert ground while three others hover in the sky like surveillance aircraft. The cat is breaking down into her essential component parts: triangles, sharp and probing eyes, whip-like tail, lunar aspirations, attitude.
There’s a mouse scuttling through these paintings, too. A red-eyed beastie pops up in many of Bedder’s frames. It is not exactly furtive, but we get the sense that it’s on the run. In one of the show’s many conceptually provocative pieces, a rat is suspended in a rectangular prism rendered in defiance of dimensional logic. When it wraps its tail around one of the columns in its Escher’s cube, we can’t really tell if its fuzzy hindquarters are closer to the foreground or the background of the image. A mirroring effect duplicates the rat’s head, which peeps out of a lower corner (or is it an upper corner) of the box. Being everywhere and nowhere offers an otherworldly sort of protection.
It also multiplies the rat’s visibility — and vulnerability. There’s no cat in the picture that contains the Escher cube, but there are staring cats all around the room. Since Bedder and Halpern present “Cat, Stick, Easel, Moon” as one continuous dreamscape, we get the sense, absolutely, that this rat is in trouble. At the very least, it’s being watched. The rat would like to step free of its box, but it is aware that its adversary possesses powers that it doesn’t have. The cat is a master of disguise. It can become the moon: the great spyglass overhead, scouring the streets and illuminating the night. The cat can devolve, or perhaps evolve, into a long, tense, Miró-like squiggle in tabby colors.
Bedder frequently matches the floor of the room that the feline is sleeping in with the animal’s colors and markings. In this world, the cat is close to the ground of being. The cat governs her dominion; she’s aware, at rest, but ready to strike. The mouse is transient, enterprising but hunted, an invader, an upsetter of the order. Which one we identify with is a matter of personal preference, and, perhaps, depends on where in Bedder’s interior world we’re standing.
It’s that existential drama and tension that makes Bedder’s work crackle. She describes herself as a surrealist, and she’s definitely in that lineage, but we don’t get the sense that we’ve slipped into a parallel plane when we see her work, as we do when we look at the paintings of artists like Kay Sage. Everything in this show is, and often literally, sublunar. The moon, nighttime’s foremost representative, becomes a plate, and on that plate, the artist rests the head of a fish, emissary of the unconscious, and, to a cat, dinner. Objects around the kitchen take on cosmic dimensions: in “Clouds in My Coffee,” a handsome kettle reflects the desert landscape in its stainless-steel facets. Bedder has plopped the coffee brewer on a pillow as if it’s the percolating head of a dreaming person. She drops subtle hints that somebody, or something, is in repose and fast asleep, agitated only by the nagging presence of a few mice.
Maybe something else is perturbing the slumberer, too. We’ve gone ten paragraphs, and we haven’t even discussed the show’s defining and galvanizing sigil. In frame after frame, Bedder returns to the image of a bright red stick — two twigs, really, joined at the base in a Siamese-twin pairing — connected to no tree, and derived from no other object in the show. In its pleasant crookedness, its haunting bareness, and its distinct otherness, it is a resonant dream-fragment. It could be a wishbone, drying on a sink after a Thanksgiving dinner and inviting a hopeful snap, or a human body ascending with arms outstretched, pleading to the heavens, asking Y.
Sometimes the animate beings in the show mimic its contours: distended cat legs in shadow, the sinewy arms of a starfish, the antennae of insects, the ragged redfish tail. Bedder scatters dozens of these sticks across her canvases, hanging them in the sky like a crucifix above a bedroom door, floating them in the ether, connecting tiny versions via knotted string. One pops up on a picture in progress leaning on an easel; a painting within a painting; a door to another door to another door.
More than the cat, the rat, or even the moon, it is the stick that messes with our heads. We badly want to know what it means: what it is about its crimson coat and peculiar curves that pulls on our gaze like a rod draws lightning. But what it signifies is less interesting than what it indicates about how our perception works. The stick is the thing in the dream that lets you know that you’re dreaming. It’s the odd bit that won’t fit, the thread that can’t be tucked back into the tapestry, the crack in the iPhone glass. It’s a tuning fork of the unconscious, and it’s humming with frequencies we discern only when we’re as passive and receptive as we are when we sleep.
By varying the size (though never the shape) of the sticks, Bedder and Halpern give us the North Pole by which we can orient ourselves. They can then move us around this colorful landscape as designers do when they drop us in the middle of a wigged-out videogame. They reel us in and push us away, they prop us up on the kitchen table, they toss us into the water to swim with the fishes, they blur the distinction between states and matter, just as substances are elided in a dream state. In one sensational frame, they pull the camera all the way up, and out, and jolt us with a great jagged lightning bolt, a cousin in color and in attitude to the stick, suturing together sea and the sky.
It might seem doubtful that Rachel L Bedder’s modest-sized canvases can do all of that, just as it might strike you as unlikely that a space as humble as SMUSH can act as a staging area for such effects. But that’s the magic of sequential art, smart and strategic curation, and games played within the sandbox of our minds. The imagination is a big-ass amusement park, and it does not require elaborate special effects to get the roller coaster rumbling. It’s mostly a trick of positioning, receptivity, and learning to look at familiar things from a different angle. Every night when we close our eyes, we’re shown wilder images than a million-dollar Hollywood movie could ever provide. This is why a century after the emergence of Miró, surrealism still speaks to us.
Nevertheless, the gallery is taking no chances. At the opening, SMUSH staff circulated a school-style worksheet disguised as a scavenger hunt. Prompts encourage you to search for the sticks, speculate about the mood of the cat, hunt down the little creatures in the corners of these frames, and, above all, pay close attention to what the artist is doing. It’s a clever trick from an ambitious neighborhood creative center staffed by people who’ve thought a lot about the way education and communication work. More galleries should adopt it. As for your correspondent, well, I just hope I got a passing grade.
(“Cat, Stick, Easel, Moon” comes down on November 15. Rachel L Bedder will appear at the closing party on Saturday the 14th.)
