Reality Ender: The Hits & Misses of Avery Singer’s NYC Premier

More effective is Wojak Battle Scene (2021), which portrays the most disorganized army I’ve ever seen. Against a green backdrop, soldiers fight individual battles that never seem to coalesce. One soldier stabs a sword into a man with a striped shirt below him who looks like he’s sleeping. In another corner, a man with headphones plays Fortnite, a battle-focused video game. Nearby, a soldier points a gun at nothing. YouTube and Balenciaga logos are interspersed too. Even in wartime, we can’t resist the urge to place advertisements, or to think about a video we just watched on YouTube.

China Chalet (2021) connects to the internet but also introduces another theme that runs through the show: the promise and peril of intoxication. It depicts the detritus of a night out at the now-shuttered restaurant and club. There are bottles of pills, poppers, and other drugs strewn across white tablecloths, labels from White Claw hard seltzers, and lots and lots of iPhones, because even when we’re not confined to the internet, we’re still performing for it. Layered over the display are flashes of red and blue paint, and lines of acrylic rubber, making deciphering what’s underneath like trying to piece together the moments of a half-remembered night. It made me miss them.

While these works provoked knowing recognition, I was even more impressed by Singer’s black and white paintings, created with Sketch-Up, an architectural software that shows her drafting skills. Sculptor (2021), is almost cubistic in it’s rendering of the subject, head down, hands clasped in concentration, a bottle of beer just barely in the frame. As in China Chalet, there’s black liquid rubber obscuring the figure, but deciphering the different pieces makes the viewer feel like a detective. The search is rewarded with glimpses of emotion, especially in the hands, coiled together with tension. The same is true of its neighbor, The Studio, (2012) with jumbled chairs stacked on each other, the artist just visible underneath it all, covered in the same rubber marks dripped like an updated Pollock technique. It’s a technically impressive and knowingly funny comment on how we romanticize artists. They too are at any minute in danger of collapsing under the weight of furniture and paperwork. I also loved Technique (2021) which resembles rows of New York scaffolding, with windows behind them, and people behind those windows, attempting to live their lives amidst the chaos. It’s a portrait of a city constantly under construction, one that we somehow live in despite the jackhammers.

Ultimately, I think the more timely work will get the most attention, but viewers should spend equal if not more time on the paintings that show Singer’s technical mastery. Those make you work a little harder to piece together what you’re seeing, but it’s worth it.