After Effect was a group exhibition featuring immersive artworks in painting, sculpture, installation and film that ranged from the cosmic and psychedelic to the sensual and visionary. The exhibition looked at historical paintings and film from the ‘30s and ‘40s alongside works from contemporary artists that address notions of the sublime, touching on mortality, landscape, the body, and various modes of abstraction.

Dan Colen produced a new triptych of large skyscapes based on stills from the 1940 Walt Disney film Fantasia, work that continued his exploration of spirituality and mortality via pop culture. Achieved through an arduous process of layering paint, the cloud paintings evoke both the cartoon and the Romantic sublime. The paintings appeared alongside a sculpture from Colen’s recent Canopic series, solid silver casts taken from the negative space formed by roadside guardrails mangled in automobile accidents.

Painter Loie Hollowell’s work displayed an abstract geography of bodily forms – vaginas, nipples, phalluses, tongues – in vivid oil on linen canvases that radiate with texture and symmetry. The artist finds inspiration in Catholic iconography as well as the architectural forms of European Gothic and Islamic architecture, while recent praise in the New York Times places her in a lineage with both Georgia O’Keefe and Judy Chicago.

After Effect also featured historical works from the Transcendental Painting Group, artists who figure largely in Hollowell and Colen’s lexicon. Founded in New Mexico, the Transcendental Painting Group existed from 1938-1942 and aimed to “defend, validate and promote abstract and non-objective art.” The exhibition included works by Emil Bisttram, Raymond Jonson, Agnes Pelton, Florence Miller Pierce, and Stuart Walker. The group’s manifesto identifies their aim to carry “painting beyond the appearance of the physical world, through new concepts of space, color, light and design, to imaginative realms that are idealistic and spiritual” in an effort to “widen the horizon of art.” 

Ballroom Marfa’s south gallery featured Oskar Fischinger’s iconic Radio Dynamics (1942), a silent animated film which ebbs and flows with rhythmically edited abstract forms. This meditative, painterly work is suggestive of Fischinger’s overlooked contributions to Fantasia and is just one example of his wildly influential role as the father of the visual music tradition.

In Ballroom’s courtyard, Arturo Bandini hosted two shows-within-the-show, Vapegoat Rising and Dengue Fever, over the run of After Effect. These micro-exhibitions play with and off of the exhibition’s transcendental themes. Arturo Bandini is a collaborative project/gallery by artists Michael Dopp and Isaac Resnikoff. Their first installation, Vapegoat Rising, is described by the artists as a “percolation of fog and rock” and features work by Josh Callaghan, Kathryn Garcia, Mark Hagen, Rick Hager, Yanyan Huang, Whitney Hubbs, Sofia Londono, and Barak Zemer. The second show, titled Dengue Fever, functioned as “a sort of Henri Rousseau delirium, a jungle of feeling, and a landscape turned inwards” with work by Kelly Akashi, Marten Elder, John Finneran, S Gernsbacher, Drew Heitzler, Sarah Manuwal, Calvin Marcus, and Roni Shneior.

From the cosmic to the corporeal, the works in After Effect evoked a transformative aesthetic effect – showcasing a spectrum of sublimity across mediums and revealing the resonances that exists between the artist’s process and the viewer’s experience. 

Installation Images