NEW YORKSue TompkinsLisa Cooley Gallery // Through March 27The opening moments of the Life Without Building song “The Leanover” are full of stutters: “If I, if I, if I, if I, if I / B-b-b-b-baby g g g , so g g g, you you you,” sings front woman Sue Tompkins before slurring the phrase “if I lose you in the street” so that it sounds like “Elysian street.” The Glaswegian post-punk band called it quits in 2002, but Tompkins’s slippery language has continued to inform a parallel visual art practice. The pieces in the tongue-twisting “When Wayne Went Away,” are typewriter-generated works on paper as well as paintings—gloopy, raw, occasionally jammed into uneven diptychs, smeared with letters or fragments of words (“NV” across the surface of Swapping, 2016, or an M-shaped gouge to the canvas in Sewn in the sunshine, 2016). Pennies, wooden dowels, or tiny plastic mice are collaged into some works; elsewhere, Tompkins liberally applies glitter and isn’t afraid to slash the canvas, conjuring a hybrid of Chris Martin and Lucio Fontana. The effect is thoughtfully messy—slapdash, but not slackerish.In the smaller back gallery space, The view from the long couch, 2015, a multipart installation that incorporates typewritten text across sheets of weathered, creased paper, is the most direct connection to Tompkins’s past as a performer and lyricist. It’s delirious and spontaneous-seeming, generating a punkish concrete poetry with a knack for nonsense: “get flopped…remember the purple…Who Wants To Divde a Perpsi?” ([sic] stuff indeed). In conjunction with the exhibition, Tompkins gave a solo performance at the space. She bounced as if to the rhythm of an unheard backbeat; gesturing occultly, she seemed at times to be engaged in an unsuccessful game of charades while chirping enigmatic phrases—“My career! Move on! Move on!” or “Uh-oh, put my daughter on my knee.” Tompkins seems tapped into some wild, childlike energy herself. It’s inspiring, and more than a little contagious.
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