SEAN SULLIVAN | In the shade of a tree | March 13 – April 23, 2022

The work in this show was made at home on the dining room table between meals and school lessons. It was often made after work if there was energy and on the weekends as well. In every way it is tied to home – in scale, in material and most especially, in spirit. It is make-do, modest and messy —‘lived in’ like our home. When a piece was completed or stalled in creative limbo, I didn’t take it to the studio to contemplate, but instead hung it on the kitchen wall next to the sink. In this way I could consider it while doing the dishes or helping to prepare meals. Materially the work combines cardboard with crayon, paints of various kinds as well as just about anything else I could get my hands on. I’ve since come to think of this process as something akin to nest building. — Sean Sullivan

I read (Sean Sullivan’s work) as concrete poems, as homages to Charles Demuth’s painting, “I Saw the Figure 5 in Gold” (1928), which was inspired by William Carlos Williams’ poem, “The Great Figure.” Photographs by Rudy Buckhardt and Walker Evans, children’s illustrated books, and the Dada sound poems of Hugo Ball all came to mind, as well as James Castle’s soot drawings of letters and symbols and Shirley Jaffe’s abstract paintings full of idiosyncratic geometric shapes and scriptive lines. It is also clear to me that Sullivan has come up with something all his own — that he is taking a singular path. I mention these associations as a way to help define what Sullivan is up to. He is a unique synthesis of book designer and illustrator, concrete and sound poet, visual artist and print-maker.
— John Yau, Hyperallergic, April 2018

By animating a hodgepodge of materials, textures, and patterns, these pieces exhibit the makeshift peculiarities of domestic crafting. A few vignettes recall miniature interiors: In one compartmentalized construction, Rooms of different temperature and feeling, angled slopes read as unadorned stairwells, while in the high-relief You take the spirit in (both 2021) bits of foam, wire, and cardboard become a fixture that calls to mind an architectural ornament. Despite their playful, diminutive scale, these works are extricated by abstraction from twee, treacly territory. — Alexandra Drexelius, Artforum, April 2022

Distinct from Sullivan’s delicate draftsmanship, the works are quite sculptural. As in shadowboxes, cardboard perimeters and partitions protrude from their surfaces, which carry dainty miscellanea. But what these shallow receptacles primarily hold is color, which the artist turns into something palpably physical, object-like. Evoking a serviceable yet slapdash placement of paint on a palette, each hue—be it a smear of white, a blob of blue, or a wash of gray—applied in its own unique way holds its own. Sullivan’s elegantly crude tableaux come from working with what you have, but they voice the thrill of finding what you may have forgotten. It’s stirring how a morsel of something can hold one’s attention, unearthing a memory or delivering a quiet (yet marvelous) revelation.
— Alexandra Drexelius, Artforum, April 2022