Stunningly light, the sculptures of Madeline Gallucci and the paintings of Margaret Crowley bear witness while mourning the impossibility of full recognition. In “Sympathy Ribbon,” up at Grunts Rare Books, the pairing of Gallucci and Crowley’s work holds the perfect, painful tension between remembrance and transition.

Gallucci’s paintings manipulate surface and depth to make us acutely aware of the distance between the two. The top layer of her compositions are stark blue marks that imitate painter’s tape, painted in sharp contrast to the hazy contents below. Though the tape frames the paintings and guides our eyes towards semilegible letters or shapes, we quickly seek to look beyond—and therein find resistance.

Past the tape exterior, textured gradients become the foggy window of a car

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