On a recent trip through wild Western New York, I visited a gallery called Rivalry Projects in downtown Buffalo, a city teeming with creative enterprises. Rivalry, an astute young gallery showing smart work both aesthetically cool and socially trenchant, is a crisp and spartan design that dignifies the work with ample space and light. Inside the gallery you will encounter an affable and deeply informed gallerist who will be pleased to speak about the art on view to a collector, a class visit, a shy artist, or a random passerby; each conversation approached with equally engaged sincerity. I know this by observation, for this is a well-trafficked exhibition space, indicative of the scene that is thriving around town, as sharp-eyed visitors make mention of the previous or next stop on their art beat.
The proprietor here, also an artist, keeps a secondary multi-use gallery in the back of the building that functions as project room, production studio and viewing space. On the day of my visit, the work presented in the front room is a body of work, or should I say a work of bodies: a minimally hung painting display that entices, playfully confounds, and rewards the eye foremost. It is a show titled, “Belly” by the artist Joan Linder. Linder is known for large format, obsessive site-specific drawings that are performatively large and insistently detailed. The work on view at Rivalry is something quite different. I learned that this is a series of paintings made two decades ago, when the artist’s primary medium was paint, and her surfaces were built with an equally competent though different kind of certainty than her drawings.
