Review

"Olla Podrida", Acrylic on Wood Panel.

Emily Sall
Information is Incidental
(Joint show)

Noon-5 p.m.

Paragraph Gallery
23 E. 12th
Kansas City, MO
816.221.5115

Hours Noon-5 p.m., Thursdays and Saturdays
Runs through: Aug. 4

Artist's site: http://www.emilysall.com
Gallery Site: http://www.charlottestreet.org

When two artists collaborate on an exhibition, but also show their solo work, it can be easy to focus too much on the whole and not enough on the parts which make it up.

Emily Sall and Rebecca Ward do work and (inter)play well together in Information is Incidental, their shared exhibition at Paragraph Gallery. That's evident from their joint work, a bright, loopy tape and vinyl installation titled Muster and Rally. It also shows in the way Ward's solo pieces play off Sall's -- and vice versa -- with similar uses of color and geometry.

(That's especially impressive given that Sall, who is from Kansas City, and Ward, who is from Austin, didn't meet until a week before the show opened.)

Take away the collaborative context, though, and Sall's four works -- three acrylic-on-wood paintings and one vinyl wall piece -- would more than stand on their own merits.  They'd run, dance and play on them, too.

The acrylics (the largest of which, Olla Podrida, is shown above), manage the seeming contradiction of being both meticulous and riotous -- brightly colored panels full of joy, laid out in straight lines, sharp bends and smooth curves. It's part urban architectural aspiration, part angular jazz, all woven together on a loom of imagination and intuition.

Sall offsets the "busy" parts of her panels with plenty of open space in neutral colors, giving the works both playfulness and tension. It's yet another seeming contradiction, but it works.

Given that this is a collaborative show, it also bears mention that Sall's painstaking masking technique makes the glossy parts of her panels look less like paint and more like tape or vinyl. It's an effective tie-in not only to Sall's own vinyl work but to Muster and Rally. The shared piece provides a sturdy suspension -- or suspended, given that it hangs from the ceiling -- bridge between Sall's paintings and Ward's huge installation, Seventeen is Sharp.

Harmonies are strongest when each voice is solid on its own. In this two-part performance, Sall has created art that blends perfectly into the mix without getting lost in it.