Casey Kaplan
What to See in New York Art Galleries This Week
NATHAN CARTER
Through July 29. Casey Kaplan, 121 West 27th Street, Manhattan; 212-645-7335, caseykaplangallery.com.
The Dramastics are an all-girl punk band that invaded the imagination of the sculptor Nathan Carter in 2014. He hadn’t made figurative work before, but the band’s members came suddenly to life in his studio as paper dolls with exaggerated, slender proportions, naïvely drawn faces, and a perfect pop color scheme of Parisian bleu, blanc and rouge. He also constructed friends, rivals and venues, all on display in his latest show, in a busy, eager-to-please installation; wrote and recorded songs; and made an entertainingly silly animated concert video, which screened at the installation’s opening.
But the stars of this gallery show, as such, are six wall-mounted sculptures more in line with Mr. Carter’s earlier work. (Their connection to the band is that they are notionally “fascinators,” or decorative hats for the characters.) Made from found aluminum painted in an old-school but eye-catching palette of pastel and primary colors with latex enamel, these explosive swoops and swooshes balance the fun-for-fun’s-sake cheer of the Dramastics project with enough formal rigor to make the immediate hit of optical pleasure more lasting. In “Fascinator for Abby Abstract,” a spiral of thin lines is ornamented with half-moons of magenta and blue; in “Fascinator for Hyped-up Harriet,” a small yellow circle perches atop a lavender bow like a diffident moon.
WILL HEINRICH