art
Fuzzy art, it turns out, is something of a relief. This show’s title, says curator Patrick Costello, refers vaguely (fuzzily?) to the soft texture of the fabric that’s one of the collection’s favorite materials, and to its “warm and fuzzy” emotional slant. Though the Bridge, like most gallery spaces, tends toward the architecturally hard and chilly, the show manages to evoke both sunlit Saturday-morning cartoon sessions and a deeper sense of human capacities. Costello and his co-curator Andy Jenkins, both UVA students, organized another impressive show at the Bridge last spring; Costello says “Fuzz” (in which Victoria Long joins their team) aims to raise the bar. It does so with a smile.
The exuberant Fuzz art exhibit at the Bridge pops with the joy of its creators and the pleasure of hands-on art, from drawings and knittings to piñatas by Kristin Smith (pictured).
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What’s to be happy about? Well, the fact that it’s fun to make things. These artists—locals plus out-of-towners from New York to Miami—are still in close touch with an instinct to lose oneself in creating that most people shed after childhood. Tiny gestures, not grand ones, fill the room. Kristin Smith, for example, contributes two magnificent piñata-like sculptures covered in hundreds of small scraps of colored paper, while Alvaro Ilizarbe’s drawings look like blocks of tiny lines from afar. Up close, they are a mass of text bits, each in its own hand-drawn font: “Don’t play no games,” “Food pyramid”—a visual analog of mental cacophony, like the inside cover of a savvy 10th-grader’s notebook toward the end of a long school year.
The sense is that most of these artists are young (though one, Harvey Fuell, is a self-taught 81-year-old World War II veteran from Richmond) and, having grown up in an irony-soaked culture, they make work that acknowledges that stance in a reassuringly relaxed way. It’s as though the aggressive emptiness of, say, Pop Art has been not rejected but reimagined by the next generation. The marriage of irony and joy is clear in Kevin Hooyman’s drawings, a highlight of this show. Some are cartoonish watercolor-and-ink figures: animals, birds, a Pan-like creature with a flute and large leaves for ears. Others are simpler and more poetic, expressive but not sentimental: Two delicate white storks are suspended on a white page, one saying “Almost nothing is happening/ I feel like I am waiting but I don’t know what to wait for,” and the other answering, “You are confused/ Everything is happening right now.”