Recess: The Darkness at EV Gallery

Sculptor Kael Frank and photographer-filmmaker Max Drexler

Recess, a new show opening Feb. 24 at EV Gallery, 621 E. 11th Street, is a frightening wanderment through the subconscious of a pair of young artists toward a space where fear and fantasy interact like lemon juice and a paper cut.

Sculptor Kael Frank and photographer-filmmaker Max Drexler, both students at Pratt Institute, say the installation exists in an “in-between space beneath a blanket of fear, floating adrift in barren dreams.” If their shared goal is to draw viewers into their twisted world of youthful sunset, damage and fear, the show is a sevenfold triumph. A dark Dadaist phantasm brought to life.

A bed to soil

A bed to soil, a piece by Frank consisting of a crib filled with suggestions of early death with black detritus on the floor below it, stands out. Is it the debris or the death that is more terrifying, or is it some combination of these elements? There is the promise of pain and unpleasantness in this piece, a jail-like crib, an invisible baby corpse, shit on the floor.

Frank, Drexler and EV Gallery owner Kerri Lindström setting up Recess

Frank says that as a child she was encouraged to “discover” as much as to learn and that digging in the mud and studying the alphabet were interchangeable sources of intellectual gain for her. In this, she seems to be offering up exploration and yearning as a new form of counter-intellectualism. 

“Exploration is in that sense fused to my practice: art-making being the vehicle for discovery – so to speak – of physical forms to represent what might otherwise be intangible – memories, sensations, and so on,” she said.

if not in the flesh, than by the skin of my teeth

This is clear in another of her pieces called if not in the flesh, than by the skin of my teeth, in which cast bronze bibelots are scattered about a bed of sand. Here again, Frank seeks to occupy a zone on the outskirts of reality, where nature and man-made organics come together to pose questions about time, humanity and growth.

Drexler, meanwhile, displays in his photographs an equally disturbing dreamscape, where darkness triumphs and anxiety rules. His work may be a bit more human than that of Frank, but it is nonetheless equidistant from the sunshine.

He suggests the tenebrosity that exists across his oeuvre is not there for its own sake, or to provoke cheap discomfort, but rather to escort viewers toward the invisible spaces that are understood to exist amidst the darkness.

“By watching or encountering my art, the emphasis on the meaningful moments that fall between the banal will empower a viewer to embrace their own unique interests in the world, and see that regardless of circumstance, even through darkness, light and joy still exist,” he said.

Veil

This idea is quite literally portrayed in his photograph Veil, a composition that exists largely in shades of gray and charcoal. It depicts a window, with curtains drawn, but allowing a penumbra of pink light to penetrate.

Travelers

In another, called Travelers, several people are half-submerged in a body of water and appear to be in distress as they are drawn toward what can only be interpreted as their doom in a whirlpool of bright white light. The adjusted horizon adds an additional layer of angst to a piece that is already a study in perilous circumstance.

Combined, the work of Drexler and Frank conveys a grown-up sense of surety, ambition, wisdom and confidence. As frightening as a Drexler-Frank pathography could be, there’s no denying that the two artists create with a sense of purpose that plumbs the depths of their young souls. They are two artists now consumed by darkness whose futures are nonetheless quite bright.