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Michelle Weinsteins and installation artist John von Bergen’s concurrent solo exhibitions exist together under the soaring roof of the DUMBO gallery Smack Mellon, located in the neighborhood’s former boiler building. Although the two shows are separate, the works speak beautifully to one another.

In the vast front room, the American-born, Berlin-based von Bergen’s gestural sculpture Whip Lash, 2010, seems as if it were in the process of being violently ripped from the wall. The massive, fossillike structure — cast from a mold of one of the gallery’s columns and built on site using Styrofoam, polymer gypsum, and metallic paint — is an unavoidable, somewhat foreboding and apocalyptic presence, throwing dramatic shadows that crawl along the surrounding surfaces. The room is otherwise completely bare, creating a direct and dynamic contention among the sculpture, the architecture, and the comparatively tiny human spectators.

In the small gallery, Michelle Weinstein’s visionary landscapes are delicate and mesmerizing. Based on the poem "Shine, Perishing Republic," by the 20th-century Californian poet Robinson Jeffers, the images — composed of lines meticulously drawn in dipping pen and ink, watercolor, and encaustic on paper — encompass intricate patterns and shapes, depictions of ships, mountains, orbs, trees, and spacecraft, dynamic black and white circles, and sweeps of pale color. Many of the works spill over the raw edges of one sheet of paper onto another, the two taped together with the same precision displayed in the drawn lines. The pictures are tactile and textural, the subjects simultaneously familiar and foreign, like Bridget Riley paintings that have seeped into an unearthly Grand Canyon. 

"John von Bergen/Michelle Weinstein" originally appeared in the May 2010 issue of Modern Painters. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Modern Painters' May 2010 Table of Contents.