Gallery: DC Moore Gallery
Days/Hours: Tuesday - Saturday, 10am-6pm

Last week was the opening of ZIG ZAG ZIG at DC Moore Gallery, a group exhibition which includes the debut of three new films by photographer Duane Michals, as well as paintings by Chie Fueki, Joyce Kozloff, Doron Langberg, Bridget Mullen, Didier William, and Alexi Worth.

Michals’ “mini-movies,” Interruptus, Zip Zap Zip, and Thrill incorporate a technique which he calls “Zig Zag Color.” Affirming formal play and complexity, artifice and earnest emotion, the rangy spirit of Michals’ new work also provides a temperamental touchstone for the five painters, who otherwise represent a spectrum of approaches, generations and national origins.

Intricate and eye-dazzling, Chie Fueki’s paintings picture contemporary life in spectacular motion. We are drivers or bicyclists, maneuvering within confetti-like blizzards of memory and information. In Didier Williams’ images, on the other hand, the body itself becomes a kind of blizzard, a swarm of eye-shapes gouged by the hundreds from the surface of wood panels, communicating anxiety and fragility. Bridget Mullen’s images are still more crowded and fractious, composed of bulbous cartoony spray-painted shapes, like a rogue’s gallery of graphic impulses, at once beguiling and absurd.

In a more naturalistic mode that is closer to Michal’s own erotic preoccupations, Doron Langberg represents the pleasures of daily life, affirming and elevating queer domesticity and vulnerability through portraiture, and his own tender, virtuosic painterly touch. Worth’s Ballot Box paintings, on the other hand, offer a more abstract and whimsical naturalism. Each painting depicts a translucent box, partially filled with folded paper shapes that might be ballots, raffle tickets, or multicolored currency. The content of the paintings, like so much else, depends on these unsolicited contributions.

Last but hardly least, Kozloff’s JEEZ is an enormous altarpiece of brightly-colored Christomania. Hundreds of images of Jesus, adapted from Old Master paintings and roadside kitsch, zigzag across a pseudo-antique map of the globe, creating a massive affirmation of color, complexity, and (good-natured) irreverence.