Exhibition Review by Maria Porges at Shotgun Review

October 4, 2009

“With assured brushwork and equally deft needlework, Narangkar Glover has made a group of canvases that feature a homemade concrete skateboarding bowl located in her own Oakland backyard. This extraordinary structure, fondly referred to by those who know it as ‘the pond,’ is painted in real life a color that can only be described as swimming pool blue (an homage, perhaps, to the oft- practiced appropriation of empty pools as places to skate).
Glover depicts tranquil scenes bathed in bright California sunshine. Three of the six large works in the main gallery include a single male figure seen against the blue of the bowl, its bright yellow rim, empty, pale skies, and swaths of rapidly brushed shrubbery. The remaining three are pure landscapes: plein air in the ‘hood, lemon trees and jasmine accented by occasional spirals of razor wire visible above a board and chain-link fence.

In one of these nature/culture studies, Glover has primarily embroidered the image in wool instead of painting it. Below a single, stylized tree and flowering oxalis, a bold, slightly drippy stroke of yellow paint has been laid over a needlework version of the skating structure’s rim. The conjunction of a craft traditionally associated with women with big, typically male, painterly gestures frames this body of Glover’s work as a whole, suggesting a feminist reading of those quiet figures posed against the blue and green of garden and water.”

Narangkar Glover: “It’s Gonna Be Awesome,” is on view at Blankspace Gallery in Oakland through October 11, 2009.