Art to Watch: September Gallery Guide

“Gale Antokal – Some Drawings” and “Some Painting, Sculpture and Drawings” at Patricia Sweetow Gallery

In one room hang remarkably sad, quiet sketches by Gale Antokal – hazy silhouettes and fading figures, whispered onto canvases through impossibly delicate chalk work. Compare this iciness to the gallery’s other room, a boisterous collection of eight distinctive visual and sculptural voices. Artists David Huffman and Jamie Vasta blast their already strikingly colored canvases with glitter. Why? Vasta had an explanation for me: the stuff turns her dark portrayal of sirens (seductive bird-women who lure sailors to their deaths, if you’re not up on your Greek mythology) from static to cinematic, drawing the viewer’s bedazzled eye places it might not otherwise have gone. Girlish, yet predatory.