“With play and curiosity, we can test boundaries and decipher our space,” teases the press release for “Puddle, Pothole, Portal,” on view at the SculptureCenter in Long Island City through January 5. Space — and its boundaries, confusions, dead-ends, and illusions — is a fitting way to think about this show, which inaugurates the institution’s renovation and expansion courtesy of Andrew Berman Architects. Regular visitors to SculptureCenter will find themselves pleasantly disoriented by those changes — new entrance, new courtyard, an elevator! — and that’s before engaging with the works on view, many of which further screw with one’s perception of the strikingly cavernous venue and its chic-but-still-unnerving subterranean rooms.
Humor and manically surreal energy rule the day in this exhibition — no surprise, given that co-curators Ruba Katrib and artist Camille Henrot cite both Saul Steinberg and films like “Who Framed Roger Rabbit?” as its thematic touchstones. The late Steinberg himself gets a small side room, with a selection of mixed-media drawings mostly from the ’70s. “Bank Street (Three Banks),” 1975, sets the prevailing tone for the show as a whole: Quasi-whimsical, but undercut with a dose of poison. (Steinberg’s fantasia depicts what might be a shell-shocked vet who has just machine-gunned a bevy of adorable bunnies on a small town’s main street.) Other works in the show likewise coax a bit of laughter before reminding us that, you know, we’re all going to die some day — like Danny McDonald’s “A Grim Forecast,” which places a dopey hound dog figurine atop an upside down styrofoam skull; or Jordan Wolfson’s inkjet prints, which pair illustrations of a buck-toothed protagonist with Spam-worthy verbal diarrhea (“Newbody Racist American Spit Your Teeth Here Kiss Here.”) In the basement space, the lighthearted and the ominous square off against each other, with Olga Balema’s colorful, taffy-like constructions contrasted against a sculpture by Abigail DeVille: a rickety, rattling conveyor belt bearing bedraggled cargo.
While there’s plenty to explore here, “Puddle, Pothole, Portal” does have two clear stand-outs, both represented with several pieces throughout the space. Jamian Juliano-Villani has a handful of large paintings, including “Messy View,” 2013, which features a charming self-portrait, a few military dudes in a firing line, a bunch of headless, nude mannequins, and a perplexed guy smoking a pipe and wearing what might be 3-D glasses. (Another painting depicts a pair of pants that have committed suicide-by-hanging.) Astoundingly prolific, Juliano-Villani’s process seems to involve jamming as many disparate visual ideas into a single canvas as possible, creating paintings that are illogical, hilarious, and technically astute. The show’s other star is Win McCarthy, whose resin puddles, fluid glass forms, and mysterious troughs are in several locations upstairs; one mostly hidden sculpture — a faucet spurting a stream of glass water — is hung some 20 feet up on the wall. The work has much in common with Alice Channer or the drooping, melting qualities of young artist Alisa Baremboym (included in the 2012 Katrib-curated exhibition “A Disagreeable Object”).
Elsewhere in the show you’ll find motorized sculptures based on emoticons; rough-hewn, blocky sheep that resemble scrappy versions of Les Lalanne’s fluffy menagerie; a puppet; and a glass door that doesn’t work. Think you’ve got it figured out? Consult Henrot’s “visual essay” in the smartly designed exhibition catalog and you’ll find yourself pleasantly resubmerged in a veritable puddle of weird, where Felix the Cat shares space with Picasso and Baining fire dancers. Like the exhibition, it’s a fun place to get lost.
