“Coo” (2006), by Sara Pringle

Helping hands of Chelsea’s galleries get time in spotlight

By Stephanie Murg

A hand reaches across a stark expanse of white to deliberately place in the palm of another a collection of useful objects: a bottle of water, a stapler, a Sharpie, a roll of painter’s tape. Toiling behind the scenes, these are the hidden hands that keep the Chelsea art world chugging along. They — and the art they create — take center stage in “Nightshift II: Hidden Hands,” a group show of work by Chelsea artist assistantss that is on view through August 24 at White Box gallery on W. 26th Street.

The above scene is from the delightful eight-minute video “Hidden Hands” by John LaRocca, who conceptualized the show and organized its initial incarnation at White Box in 2005. His video piece is the only work in “Nightshift II” that directly addresses the challenges of working a day job in the art world’s hub while harboring artistic ambitions of one’s own. LaRocca, a graphic designer for Chelsea-based Atomic Design, combines text, visuals, and music (a tweaked loop of “(Last Night) I Didn’t Get To Sleep At All,” a positively infectious 1972 hit by The 5th Dimension) to call attention to the blurry line that separates artist and artist’s assistant, luck and skill, hobby and career, “hidden hand” and “art slave.”

“As the founder of the idea for an artist assistant’s show, I feel it’s my duty to ‘report’ on the state of affairs where the art market, Chelsea, and the art industry are concerned,” says LaRocca. Of the 29 other artists whose work is featured in the show, he says, “They’re working very hard not only for their employers, but the whole idea of ‘Nightshift’ is that they go home and they burn themselves out to some extent working after hours and weekends, just so they can sustain their career and make their own work.”

White Box embraced the idea of “Nightshift” as a community project. “When John LaRocca approached me two years ago with the idea of Nightshift, we welcomed it,” says Juan Puntes, founder and director of the alternative art space. “I like the idea very much, and I like to bring out the fact that people who help other people come from the same tradition as many of the artists who are successful today. Almost everybody has been an assistant to somebody else.”

“The whole point of the show is to give exposure to those who devote all of their time to others. This is their time in the spotlight,” says David Howe, the show’s curator. “In the West Chelsea gallery district especially, there are so many people behind the scenes” — at least 600, if you multiply a conservative staff size estimate of three with Chelsea’s 200-plus galleries. “Assistants know each other,” adds Howe. “And with the galleries in such close proximity, the idea of community is just built in.”

At the opening of “Nightshift II”

“Nightshift II” would be interesting for the concept alone, but Howe doesn’t rely on any gimmicks to make the show memorable. Avoiding the salon-style hanging of the original show, Howe’s skilled selection of 38 paintings, drawings, sculptures, and installation pieces ensure that “Nightshift II” stands on its own. Among the artists represented are assistants to the likes of Mel Bochner, Lee Friedlander, and Robert Rauschenberg, as well as people who work behind the scenes at such galleries and arts spaces as Metro Pictures and The Kitchen.

Among the strongest works in “Nightshift II” is “Coo” (2006) a dazzling painting by Sara Pringle that handles swirling colors like Pepto-Bismol pink, orange, and cerulean with a fresh, deft hand. Depicting a lizard-like creature preparing to devour a smaller monster, the canvas pulses with energy. Also stopping the viewer in his or her tracks is Ezra Masch’s untitled installation piece, a Carl-Andre-goes-to-daycare scenario that features a grubby, grumpy-looking baby doll standing gingerly on a white tile floor. Meanwhile, Kara Smith’s spooky, compelling painting “Learning to Dive” evokes the eerie precision and bustling alternate universes of art star Marcel Dzama in its depiction of eight bathing-capped boys preparing to jump headfirst into a gas blue cloud.

Sol Lewitt would likely smile upon the work of Nicholas Knight, whose “Exegesis (Buchanan)” is a work on paper that shows the diagramming of the sentence “There is a simplicity that exists on the far side of complexity, and there is a communication of sentiment and attitude not to be discovered by the careful exegesis of a text.” This quote wasn’t cribbed from the latest issue of Artforum but from the collected ramblings of conservative pundit Pat Buchanan. “I choose sentences that reflect on the structure of language and meaning, and as a result the drawings are loaded with reflexivity, paradox, and contradiction,” says Knight, who has completed a series of sentence diagram works.

Recent art school graduate Charles Harlan contributes “Fans,” an installation of seven black floor fans that click on and off rapidly at the whim of a computer program. “The program creates a semi-random chorus of dysfunctional products,” says Harlan. “By taking away the use value of these household appliances I have created a new and more personal way to relate with a mass-produced item.”

So how does working in Chelsea affect the work of these artists? “When you have conversations with the people who actually work in West Chelsea, you find that sometimes they’re appalled by the work that is actually marketed and sold,” says LaRocca. “And a lot of that informs the kind of stuff that they do on their own. This work passes through their hands on a daily basis and they see what sells, and at the same time, there is this sort of rough-and-tumble style or approach to their work.”

“Visiting Chelsea [galleries] has shaped my view of the art world,” says Harlan, who works as an assistant to Carol Bove, a renowned multimedia artist who is represented by the hot New York gallery Maccarone. “From my job, I have learned about running a studio and working professionally as an artist,” he says. “It is exciting to see something I helped work on in a gallery.”

For Rick Savinon, who works with artist Tim Rollins in a studio across the street from White Box and as a freelance designer, working in Chelsea has helped him gain new perspective on his own work. “Because of all of the different mediums that I’m involved with, it puts me in a position to look at things differently — graphically and artistically,” he says. “Working in the studio has also led me beyond painting to explore other branches of art, like computer graphics, computer-aided design, and designing store windows. I can bring all of that back to use in my own artwork.”

“Nightshift II” includes a striking triptych of Savinon’s Cubist-style portraits. Each is formed by multiple contour line paintings of the subject’s face from various angles and in a range of expressions, all set against a pure white ground. “By compiling multiple images together, you get the full force of that person and who that person is,” says Savinon, who names Chuck Close and Rembrandt as key influences. His move from traditional renderings of faces to these “moving portraits” was largely inspired by all of the video art he saw in Chelsea galleries over the past few years. “I took the video aspect of what I saw and wanted to push it further.”

“I think that for an intelligent, young artist, working in Chelsea affects them positively,” says Puntes. “But for more of a mediocre artist or a burned out or bitter person, it can affect them very badly. They probably feel bad and left out.” But ultimately, Puntes concludes, being an assistant is “a very good thing,” and he speaks from experience. Before working as an artist and founding White Box, he was an assistant to the late abstract expressionist Philip Pavia and is now preparing to curate a large show of Pavia’s work.

For Knight, who has worked in Chelsea since 1998, immersion in the art world has been a valuable learning experience. “Being in the commercial center of the art world, I learned a lot about what it meant to conduct oneself as a professional artist,” he says. “Some of these lessons, naturally, have been of the ‘what not to do’ variety. But on the whole, there’s no substitute for such a real-world education.”

The main lesson that Knight learned took a while for him to accept. “It was that one could be an artist and be market-conscious, and doing so doesn’t have to invalidate the artwork,” he says. At the same time, he has observed how the pressures to succeed in the art world can affect both artists and their work. “The insularity, high pressure, and money of the gallery scene in West Chelsea introduces a lot of ulterior motives into people’s behaviors, ones they’re often not even conscious of,” says Knight. “The desire for ‘success’ means that a lot of decisions get made that do, in fact, invalidate the artwork that is supposed to be the point of the entire industry.”

“Working in the underbelly of the industry, as one of the invisible people, one gets to see the little dramas play out,” says Knight. “And eventually the ‘object lessons’ form a roadmap that one can use to navigate around the pitfalls, when it’s finally your turn to drive.”