Dale Frank: Growers and Showers at the National Art School Galleries is more than enough. Even the catalogue essay by Wes Hill grants that the works are "visually too much at times." Perhaps the mystical and proto-psychedelic William Blake could be conscripted here to defend Frank, "the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom." This retrospective of recent works offers a queer aesthetic ostentation, a glitzy excess of excess. The title alone suggests by way of carnal intonation, a both / and quality, mapping a rendezvous for two kinds of art: growers and showers. "The pride of the peacock,” wrote Blake, "is the glory of God."
The terms, used glitter as part of the work and left me wondering whether contra Greenberg, the legacy of avant-garde abstract expressionism had ended in kitsch. I also found a twinkling sculptural work of a "temple dog" to be less powerful than the biomorphic works, but it did serve to indicate that we were indeed in a kind of temple.
