Art and subjecthood Valerie Margolis & Bridget Spaeth at Whitney Art Works BY CHRIS THOMPSON

Whitney Art Works officially re-opened at its York Street location with a group show of its gallery artists several weeks ago, but it’s fair to call the current show of drawings, paintings, and constructions by Valerie Margolis and Bridget Spaeth its inaugural exhibition. The first two-person show Whitney has staged since moving from its former State Street site to this extraordinary new space, the show has a visual force and thematic cohesion that have as much to do with the works of art as with the circumstances of their installation.

From entrance to exit, the space has a beautifully managed flow that extends from the garage-door entrance to the artfully appointed bathroom.

As the history of exhibition design reminds us, it’s far from a slight to suggest that art objects are not alone responsible for generating the gravity and richness of experience that we undergo in our encounter with them. Indeed, the dynamics of this show’s display, the ability of the artworks and their voices to echo, reiterate, and build upon each other, testifies to the power that can be exercised on our experience by a space carefully designed to mediate our engagement with the work.

Bridget Spaeth’s "Pin Drawings" make this point as finely as can be. In one small square frame, stretched taut with gossamer-thin fabric, she has pushed four pins, three of them white and one black, through the plane’s surface. On our side of this semi-transparent ground, they operate like Go pieces to hold the four corners of an even square. With the insertion of the fourth pin comes the possibility of a grid that can extend indefinitely in any direction. This extension is picked up and pursued on the other side of the surface, where the tips of the thin pins push out along the z-axis in four parallel lines pointing toward infinity.

Lit obliquely from above, the heads of the pins cast short bulbous shadows onto the picture plane, reiterating the presence of the surface; the points of the pins, visible through but clouded by the veil of fabric, aren’t able to register as purely sculptural objects, and so linger instead in an uncertain space between their objecthood and a shimmering visual representation of it. This one elegant little study thus uses the conceits of the modernist grid to become an investigation of the edges and spaces between drawing, painting, and sculpture.

This grappling with the painterly surface takes on a different form in Spaeth’s "Strafe," a lush and lickable pink surface cut through with paired holes about a centimeter in diameter. The title of the work, the seven sweeping arcs of uniformly paired punctures, and the quasi-violent feel of a fleshy ground torn into by bullet-sized voids — each one filled with a resin plug whose color and sheen makes it look every bit like a healing wound — combine to give this painting a visceral hold on us.

The absence of a recognizable target or visible enemy enhances the tactility of the work’s statement about the moment of violence. It invents an abstract language that plugs into the mechanism of abstraction whose operations permit us to experience the forms of violence depicted in the media as totally domesticated, distributed in a virtual elsewhere, and unrelated to any sort of physicality whatsoever. In this way Spaeth’s work underlines the ability of painting to marshal the tactile/olfactory/visual composites that are unique to that medium in order to return us to the complexity of our own modes of embodiment, and to use this to pull us bodily into the scene of violence.

Valerie Margolis’s paintings tackle complementary questions of the processes of embodiment and the ways that injury and trauma reveal them to us, and, by extension, the way that painting can hover in and around these dynamics in order to bring them to life in different forms.

In her large square near-monochrome blue painting "Misfit Final," a swollen cross, tilted at an angle, is embedded in the center of the surface. The northeast corner of the cross, whose curved bands render it as a bandage, lifts out from the picture plane. Rather than depict the shape using two equal rectangular plasters, Margolis uses one T-shaped form together with a second band that protrudes out from underneath it and which is slightly more elevated than the rest of the bandage’s four points.

This construction has the effect of a kind of lever that unearths the rest of the bandage, revealing its thin edges, which are covered with bright-red pigment — an enactment of inwardness being exposed to the world, caught up in the residues and deposits that accrue where interiority meets the exterior.

Margolis explains that the series that includes this work, entitled Bandages, consists of seven paintings by her late father that she has treated, covering them over with cloth bandages. She insists that this engagement "is not about defacement," but that "these pieces are a kind of collaboration involving loaded themes of injury or illness, protection and personal history."

Philosopher Emmanuel Levinas argued that it was precisely this "human or interhuman intrigue" that we ought to think of as "the fabric of ultimate intelligibility"; in this show it is this drama between the self and its others that is captured in and as the fabrication of painting.

Chris Thompson can be reached at xxtopher@hotmail.com

"Valerie Margolis and Bridget Spaeth" is at Whitney Art Works, in Portland, through June 18. Call (207) 780-0700.