“Boredom is really important to me,” said Michelle Grabner, standing among the pattern-based paintings in her debut solo exhibition with James Cohan Gallery in New York. “Situational boredom,” she clarified. Meaning a certain mindset that can be achieved, in the studio, through concerted effort, labor, and mark-making. (In discussing all of this with her, I actually do a good job of avoiding uttering the words obsessive or meditative.) Grabner certainly doesn’t seem bored, and this past year shouldn’t have left her with all that much time to sink into lethargic contemplation. She’s many things in addition to simply being an artist. She’s a Midwesterner — oscillating between Chicago and Milwaukee — a regional identity that’s important to her career. She’s an occasional curator, most recently part of the trio charged with organizing the 2014 Whitney Biennial. She’s a wife and a mother of three, as evidenced by a large-scale photograph, taken in the garden outside of her Milwaukee studio, which captures the whole clan; that photo is framed and suspended as one element in a hanging sculpture at James Cohan, the tenth in a series of “oysters” that Grabner has constructed. (The oyster is large, it looms, it’s composed of a sort of enormous-contact-lens-shape of bashed garbage can lids to which she’s affixed a silverpoint tondo painting, the aforementioned family portrait, and a cast-concrete sculpture of a chair her daughter once used, among other things.) She’s also a teacher — a visiting professor at Bard earlier this year, now returned to the Art Institute of Chicago — and most likely a very good one, based on the eloquent-but-no-bullshit way she discusses her own work. She’s fond of the adjective vernacular, in a positive sense. A painting of a “granny quilt” with an X pattern in its weave reminds her of a riff on a “domesticated” version of Christopher Wool or Wade Guyton.
What’s with the blankets, the gingham, the textiles, you ask? They’re not special blankets, Grabner clarified. Post-grad school, when she was a young mother, she made a lot of paintings that focused on pattern, but in a specific, and very personal, sense. “I was really drawn to patterns in my domestic middle-class lifestyle: The blankets that the kids were swaddled in,” she said. More recently, she “wanted to revisit that same kind of domestic patterning, but without the nostalgia.” Remove the biographical connection and it’s more about process — Grabner stretches the actual fabrics across the canvas, using them as a type of stencil, spray-painting atop the textile and then fleshing out the image with glossy, hardware-store-bought enamel paints that she said people often mistake for the texture of ceramics. As such, she explained, they occupy that weird space between the abstract and the figurative: Pattern-based, but also clearly depicting a real thing that exists in the world.
At James Cohan, the front-room installation visible from the street includes a low-lying stage strewn with woven-paper works paired with highly detailed close-up photographs of layered gingham fabric. Grabner has been weaving paper for a while — it’s “math and counting,” she said, and ties back to the philosophies of Frederich Fröbel, the progenitor of kindergarten. When one of her sons was a grade-schooler, Grabner recalled, he came home from school with a basic woven-paper assignment. She made a representational painting of the abstract craftwork; later, she started making actual weavings. An array of them are also laid out beneath the aforementioned “oyster,” their colors reflected in the metal of its garbage-can shell.
Not included in the exhibition, but tucked in a back room during my visit, are two familiar examples of Grabner’s practice, both tondo-shaped paintings. One is a huge, circular canvas with a hypnotic, eye-wiggling spiral pattern — an Archimedes spiral, she clarified, composed of hundreds of tiny, silvery dots. (Grabner dabs a small brush with pigment, then dot, dot, dots, each sphere gradually diminishing until the brush is reloaded, a structured-chance-based process that has much in common with Polly Apfelbaum’s recent marker-on-textile works.) Leaning against the viewing room wall there’s also a pair of small silverpoint tondos, for which Grabner loads a soft, 18-gauge silver wire into a stylus and marks with the metal as if it were a pencil. These pieces change over time, she said, darkening as they oxidize — more quickly in polluted cities. (She also does these works in goldpoint, but “it’s the least interesting — because it’s inert. It stays gold.”)
And so Grabner makes work, informed by boredom, that isn’t boring in the least, and labors over repetitive patterns and motifs that somehow don’t read as laborious or repetitive. “The danger of the work is decorating,” she said. “Overdesigning, particularly in install, could be devastating.” Yet despite the reliance on patterns — jovial, domestic, familiar, homebody — the end result is anything but rigid. Grabner takes the ordered grid and disturbs it — like a de-woven piece of burlap, the subject of another small series featured in this exhibition — smartly teasing apart the threads of convention.
