The first time I heard Sonic Youth, I felt as if a kindred, angry sister was singing directly to me. Decades later, I now see her in a new light – as a visual artist. Design Office: The City Is A Garden is her new installation at 303 Gallery that features large-scale works on paper and a performance piece called The Veseel. Graphic brush strokes and paint drips reveal names that shaped the neighborhood. 303 Gallery's statement about the work says:
Gordon's work upends this notion of beauty, exploiting its inherent artifice. New condo developments are named with boardroom idealism - The Rushmore, Fortress of Glassitude, Greenwich Lane - bestowed to evoke a desirable and ineffable lifestyle. The exhibition's floor paintings repurpose these hollow slogans onto crumpled canvases, makeshift eponyms inscribed with black paint. The painting of the show's title "The City is a Garden" hearkens back to an East Village aesthetic found in the neighborhood's funky community gardens. Here, at the entrance, it appears as an overturned emblem, the refuse of misappropriated ideas.
Being able to see and hear Ms. Gordon more clearly now, in primary roles, helps suggests a pattern. Her path has seemed continually accidental or indirect, one side-door entrance after another. As an adjunct of making art, she became a writer. As an adjunct of being a writer, she joined a band. Her work in a band, and the discipline of developing a public visual persona, may have led her toward fashion. And so on.
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