Jim Richard’s ninth exhibition at Arthur Roger Gallery brings together four of his former students—Cheryl Donegan, Amy Feldman, Wayne Gonzales, and Lisa Sanditz—to share the gallery space with him. It has the collegial feeling of a school group project, with the artists putting in their own individual contributions, but this is one where the teacher joins in too.
For most of his career, Jim Richard’s paintings amounted to “art about art,” only instead of art history, they suggested settings for short stories where the artworks themselves were the protagonists. These new works are similar but they also allude to the way digital technology now makes everything in the world seem more accessible yet somehow less real, as elusive as pixels on a computer screen.
In 2005, a 64-foot-tall billboard in Lower Manhattan showed a van driving down a mountain against a psychedelic sky. The display was a giant reproduction of the painting “Tie-Dye in the Wilderness” by artist Lisa Sanditz. The cosmic landscape, composed of real and synthetic elements, was a cuckoo complement to its urban environs in New York City, where, to my chagrin, tie-dye has fallen out of favor. Sanditz likes to travel, see faraway places, and then paint these places in far out ways.