Art in America: “Tyler Dobson”

PDF

This piece originally appeared in the First Look column of Art in America's January 2013 issue.

Tyler Dobson
By Kayla Guthrie

A yellowish material made of smashed eggs was drizzled across the surface of several small canvases. On the wall, yolk dripped luridly, pooling next to broken shells on the floor. A tiny canvas on a miniature easel read “STRATEGY IS GROWTH.” The young New York artist-gallerist Tyler Dobson collaborated with the New York artist Megan Marrin on these works, which were exhibited at New York’s Renwick Gallery last summer. Dobson’s work tends to be blithe and unpolished, and often alludes to professional or social connections.

Two years before, Dobson’s solo exhibition “A Luxury Is Difficult To Do Without” appeared at Real Fine Arts, the Brooklyn gallery he runs with co-director Ben Morgan-Cleveland. On the wall were enlarged New Yorker cartoons, unceremoniously traced in thin black paint on canvas, on the floor two deflated rubber dinghies, a combination alluding to summerhouse boredom (piles of magazines, boating equipment, no TV). Sometime after the show, the canvases were painted over by artist Michael Krebber, and a few of these appeared in “Context Message,” a 2012 group show curated by Dobson and Morgan-Cleveland at New York’s Zach Feuer Gallery. 

In Dobson and Marrin’s untitled Renwick exhibition, words were printed on eggs and canvases in Times New Roman, a drab, default typeface. The press release stated that the source for the words was “a text that the artists came across one day,” one “obviously written by a gallerist.” One egg-splattered canvas sports text rife with allusions to other dealers:

make connections to other galleries more
explicit.
Aligning with the channels
Overduin and Kite and Buchholz 
one more thing which is a credibility thumbs 
up

Conversations with Corvi Mora made sense. 

These collaborative pieces had the look of pre-stretched blank canvases pulled from their shrink-wrap and immediately smeared with eggy mess. Their embryonic symbolism blurred the line between process and product, incubating or hatching a scheme.