A study on identity and abstraction through the art of wrapping

Whether it’s a letter in the mail, a birthday gift or that package you ordered on Amazon – there’s an indescribable pleasure around opening something meant just for you. And the latest exhibit at the Lehman College Art Gallery is harnessing that feeling.

“Suprises Unknown: The Art of the Wrapping,” features 35 artists, each with their own understanding and interpretation of what wrapping imbues and works layered with connotations of identity, current events and abstraction.  

Curator Bartholomew Bland was inspired by the hyperrealist paintings of Claudio Bravo’s package series and Wayne Thiebaud's "Gift Box" (1971) -- a rectangle with soft edges, wrapped in light, seafoam green and tied with a pink pastel bow. It’s shadow, a trompe l’oeil -- a trick of the eye. 

“I liked the way they had both a sense of anticipation and ominousness, often with long shadows that suggested a kind of bleakness under happy anticipation,” Bland told The Press. “I’d love to tell you that I selected this theme to correspond with the uncertain times that we are experiencing now, but the truth is, this is a show I’ve had in the back of my mind for a decade or more.”

Ray Kleinlein’s “Polka Dots” (2016) and “Red and Green Stripes (Gift),” (2019) evoke the modernism of Thiebaud’s work and the tradition of still life paintings, combining abstraction with a study of color and light.

The oil on canvas works inspire a happiness akin to birthdays and Christmas with their whimsical wrapping paper, but they are empty inside. Kleinlein wraps the boxes himself and paints them as he sees them, down to the crinkled paper and transparent tape.

He began painting boxes while earning his Master of Fine Arts at Ohio University. He was painting his usual still life subjects, “which my professor hated,” Kleinlein recalled.

“I don’t care what the subject is, I care about the artistry and how that subject is presented,” he told the professor, who then presented Kleinlein with a cardboard box and responded, “If it doesn’t matter what you paint, then paint this!”

“And that’s where it all started,” Kleinlein said matter-of-factly – that was more than 30 years ago. 

Hanging beside his gift box paintings are Diane Smook’s “Route 9, Livingston, New York,” (2020) and “One Red Bale” (2020.) The former is of haystacks wrapped in white fabric, looking like giant marshmallows laying across a bed of green grass and sitting under a cloudy blue sky. The latter depicts a fiery-colored single bale of hay seemingly glowing under the sun. Its stark and unfamiliar appearance begs the question of its existence.

Part of her Rural Impressions series, Smook captures the beauty in the ordinary and although based in realism, her photographs reveal the surrealism of the everyday.

She finds her images in her travels abroad, on her long drives through Upstate New York and during her walkabouts, always keeping an eye out for the magnificent in the mundane. 

Smook is a self-taught artist. She earned her degree from Tufts University in early childhood education, but talent is in her blood.

"My mother was a great artist," Smook said admiringly. "She could work in oil or acrylics, she sculpted."

Across her decades of work as a photographer, Smook has been featured in dozens of group and solo shows, as well as 45 photos in the book, ‘Shaping A President: Sculpting for the Roosevelt Memorial” by Kelli Peduzzi.

Other works in the show use wrapping to relay a personal message.

Lara Alcantara Lansberg’s “Color Cover” (2020,) depicts the self-portrait artist with her face tautly cloaked by a vividly colored, silk handkerchief. The same handkerchief acts as the backdrop to the photo.

“Color Cover” is an homage to the harrowing era of Covid, a time where faces were obscured and identity was muddled.

“What makes me a woman?” Lansberg asked rhetorically. “Well, it’s obviously not my features.”

The dancers on the handkerchiefs are a stand in for community and the hot pink double-breasted blazer Lansberg wears in the photo, acts as a token of empowered womanhood.

She began photography at 13 as she grew up watching her mother, Caresse Lansberg, direct Estilo magazine – a style publication she founded in Venezuela in 1987. A photographer of the magazine became her mentor and she went on to earn a BFA from NYU and an MFA from Bard College/ International Center of Photography program. She acted for some time, as well, working on popular shows like Netflix’s “Narcos.”

But when she married, she was relegated to being a housewife and felt her creativity was stifled.

“I was the housewife I never wanted to be,” Lansberg told The Press. “And then I kind of woke up in the pandemic and I was like, ‘OK, the world is about to end. What the f--- do you want to do with your life.’”

She left domesticity behind and jumped with both feet back into the art world, reclaiming what she understood as her womanhood and identity.

The centerpiece of the exhibit is in the site-specific installation in the rotunda. Covered from top to bottom in artificial burlap and tethered by thick rope, “Undercover ID” by Puerto Rican artist, Luis Stephenberg, focuses on cultural identity and the identity of being human and how one is exempt from the other, if at all.

The burlap is stamped in red with the stenciled words, “UNDERCOVER” as mannequins trapped underneath appear like trafficked humans. A sign on the bottom left corner of one of the walls asks viewers, “Are you here?” – a play on the “You are here” depicted on legends.

“Are you legal?” Stephenberg exclaimed and challenges the viewer to question, how does one determine a life to be illegal?

Stephenberg created the work during the mass deportations of the new presidency and as Trump threatened to revoke birth-right citizenship.

“Art is the mirror of society,” Stephenberg added.  

Suprises Unknown: The Art of the Wrapping runs through May 3.