If it weren’t for the art-filled storefront marking Below Grand, anyone not immediately in the know would likely miss the experimental, artist-run gallery, nestled into a restaurant supply store on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Even though, ironically, Below Grand’s location is in its name.
Unless, that is, that unwitting aficionado happened to pass by on the night of an opening reception. Crowds typically spill out onto Orchard Street — music plays, and drinks pour pro bono. People prove the lowest common denominator. The gallery’s comprised of ten partners, connected creatives, who contribute to the common good and curate one five-week show per year. Below Grand’s latest opening, “Persiana Americana,” arrived June 24 courtesy of artist, writer, and partner Amanda Millet-Sorsa. Through July 29, it collects pieces by Paris-based artist Astrid Dick and New York-based artists Yasue Maetake and Armita Rafaat — oversized works, considering the space, altogether musing on blinds and mirrors, while honoring its curator’s intellectual penchant for color.
Millet-Sorsa embraced her first-ever curatorial foray by organizing artists she’d admired for a while from afar, from Instagram. She and Dick visited the artist’s storage space first. The economist-turned-artist’s “Persiana Americana,” the bright oil painting that became the exhibition’s title work, references a punk rock song from Dick’s adolescence in Argentina. Millet-Sorsa’s resulting curatorial statement for the whole show teems with poetry, an extension of the earnestly organic approach that allowed the exhibition to take shape in the first place, including an excerpt from Dick’s pre-teen diary, and verses Rafaat’s friend wrote around her practice.
The curator also saw the beauty, the timelines, encapsulated in that title itself. “Persiana Americana, is what in Argentine Spanish is the Venetian blind,” her statement opens. “What do Venetians call these blinds? Persianes. And in French, persiennes. It seems Venetian merchants, early on, brought these blinds from Persia, leaving us a trace of the pathways of trade, through time and place.” Otherwise mundane phrases can hold whole histories, pathways, within them.
The storefront at Below Grand bursts with a jubilant arrangement of four pieces by Dick — “Persiana Americana” the centerpiece, surrounded by two smaller, equally colorful canvases playing with different textures, opposite another work with a mini discoball mounted to it, which throws their hues about like a kaleidoscope while referencing the exhibition’s other angles.
After meeting with Dick, Millet-Sorsa visited the Midtown studios at the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts to see the mesmerizing arrangements of Armita Rafaat, whose practice spans painting, collage, and sculpture. Her artworks are scintillating, direct portals to other dimensions — whether celestial, like the artist’s more angular abstractions, or nostalgic, like more collaged work, with archetypal patterns and a vintage patina. The artist collaborated with Millet-Sorsa on which work’s she’d contributed, based on Dick’s selections. Mirrors factor into both. Like blinds, they separate an interior from an exterior.
Then, Millet-Sorsa worked with Maetake in her studio to select the exhibition’s final, truly grounding artwork — an otherworldly mixed media sculpture evoking the white flowers and elegant stature of the Japanese Sal (Saras?ju) tree, rendered here in resin and very aged silk. Rich with detail, the work presents a compare and contrast of copper side by side, oxidized on the exterior by the artist but then preserved totally pristine within the trunk globs of resin encasing it. An earthen base feels like hands holding the roots all together, a study by Maetake of Rodin.
Communication and the rhythms of commerce all shape life materially, despite their ephemerality. Art offers alone the magic mirror which allows us to spot glimpses of their existence. In totality, “Persiana Americana” isn’t simply an enveloping spectacle presented in an accessible oasis, the likes of which people move to this city to experience. Arising from active exchange itself, the show embodies the very principle’s it’s exploring. Only thing is, you have to know where to peer into.
