Fredrick Edwin Church’s Icebergs is an old friend of mine. For years, I have gravitated toward it every time I am in the Dallas Museum of Art. The painting became a political metaphor at the time of its completion, but it’s not its history that interests me. I love the way it is painted. The luminosity of the ice in the foreground kicks against the luscious atmosphere of the background. Hyper-saturation of color breaks out in places and becomes iridescent. Church supposedly learned to create this effect by studying the goniochromism of butterfly wings.
The ability to make color shift and bend has influenced many artists beyond Church’s optical trickery. Dan Flavin bathes his viewers in light. Larry Bell manipulates the sheen of surfaces to reflect the world around us. Bridget Riley puts contrasting colors so close to one another that it forces the visible spectrum to split. The works of these artists are friends too and when I walked into the Old Jail Art Center in Albany, I found some new friends in Jay Shinn’s latest exhibition Room With A View, where his prowess as an artist is on full display. The show stretches across 3 rooms, one is a regular white cube and the two others are upstairs in the jail cells which give the art center its name.
Jay Shinn, “Inside Voice,” 2014, painted neon on laminate form
Utilizing these two types of gallery spaces demonstrates the versatility of Shinn’s work. This diverse installation is like dueling pianos. The first room is the straight player whose timing is perfect and who knows how to get the joint rocking. The solid 4/4 beat hits right away with Inside Voice, a light installation of two sets of interlocking octagons, one small and one big. The surfaces of the tubes of light that face the viewer have been painted black, so the alternating warm and cool bulbs move your eye around the piece. Hung on the room’s rear wall, the appropriately titled work’s quietness drew me in because I wanted to hear more.
As I entered, the walls filled with the colors of framed prints to my left and paintings on paper to my right. The prints are polychrome lithographs made with fluorescent light that explore the form of the light installation. The paintings are reductive gradient color studies in gouache. While both sets of works stand on their own, they also work as the perfect framing device in the periphery of the installation view, like a backing track for the lead solo of the Inside Voice.
Old Jail Art Center has done an excellent job of architectural accretion. The original jailhouse has expanded the back, growing wings that are filled with art and historical objects. After leaving the first room of Shinn’s show, the collection becomes the palette cleanser before we get to the star of his show. The difficulty of transforming a jail into an art space must have been a daunting task. The challenging political implications aside, retrofitting a late-nineteenth-century stonemason-built building to display art effectively is the interior design equivalent of calculus. I applaud Patrick Kelley, OJAC director and curator, for rising to the challenge and installing Shinn’s works so they transcend the space rather than being imprisoned by it.
I had many logistic questions when I got to the iron staircase that led up to the repurposed cells holding the rest of the show. I could not imagine dragging an intoxicated, aggressive offender up those stairs. These stairs must have taken their fair share of skin and teeth, but those violent ghosts of yore evaporated in the chords of colored light floating down from the top floor. I had found the second piano player and they were playing free jazz.
The scary staircase of the Old Jail Art Center
It was the golden hour when I ascended the scary stairs and the last rays of the day were raging against the coming night through the large-barred windows that perforate the cells. Between the glowing windows on each wall were three shaped neon and panel works that overcome the exterior illumination by embracing the rigid geometry of the Sintra boards reflecting on themselves and the viewer. Their optical caress contrasts the bars of the windows which divide us from the outside and create an interior place of solace. On the back wall, there are small-framed collages made from mylar and gouache that dance with reflected light as I moved around them, underlining the fact art must be viewed in person.
Jay Shinn, “Citadel” and “Walker,” 2016, neon and Sintra
In the exhibition publication, Shinn names check Victor Vasarely and Françoise Morellet, who use geometric abstraction as an optical device. Vasarely shifts shape and color to make flat surfaces look like sculpture. Shinn uses shape and color to envelop space, making both the gallery and the viewer part of the work. Morellet manipulates repetition and variation to become visual punchlines. Shinn plays with light-hearted themes throughout the entire exhibition that remind us of the simple joy of looking at art.
Being a geometric abstractionist in the Texas Panhandle has been a lonely road for me, but this show at OJAC was like a long overdue phone call. Jay Shinn sits in the pantheon of other Texas artists like Susie Rosmarin, Gabriel Dawe, and Tom Orr who use design and materials to make their art physically affect our eyes. While our formalist artspeak is not for everyone, most still can enjoy its effects. Humans like shiny things and while it can seem like low-hanging fruit to employ reflective surfaces and electric lighting to activate a work, Shinn does it with such taste and grace it erases these biases. His works’ ease on the eyes is seductive and encourages us to surrender to the simple pleasure of seeing.
Jay Shinn, “Samba 5” and “Samba 3,” 2024, gouache and mylar on panel
Fredrick Edwin Church debuted his Icebergs in 1861, but its Romanticist grandeur was quickly overshadowed by the start of the Civil War. The unknown world of iridescent ice and saturated skies fell by the wayside, succumbing to the unpleasantness of the known world. Trying to compete with the public eye’s focus on war, Church added a broken ship mast and retitled the painting The North. This afterthought has faded, and it is Icebergs we go to see at the DMA because it is a beautiful painting, not a treatise on America’s most tragic political division.
Jay Shinn’s work is best viewed with apolitical eyes. His work transcends the formal language of its composition and embeds itself in your body. Yes, societal narratives can be overlayed onto it, as well as the Old Jail Art Center, but the world of today already floods our psyche with these. Shinn’s rooms with views remind us it is okay to put down our phones and take a break from the daily inundation of information. His show is a calm eye in the hurricane of modern life. It is a safe space where we can tune out all the noise of the day while enjoying the irony of going to an old jail to free our minds and just look.
Room with a View is on view at the Old Jail Art Center through January 11.
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