By chance, the show at the WAH Center happens to coincide with an exhibition of Karen Arm’s paintings and drawings at Pierogi 2000, where pandemonium seems to have exponentially. Arm's show includes seven paintings and six small black and white drawings, which appear to be studies for the paintings. The drawings are fresh and simple and quite seductive. But they don't hold a candle to Arm's remarkable paintings. Like McCafferty and Strahm, Arm executes her paintings according to a carefully orchestrated procedure and, predictably, her pieces share many characteristics with the work of her colleagues down the street. These are precisely machined pieces, all of a uniform size, in which simple patterns derived from nature are etched across every centimeter of each pristine surface. The resulting product is surprisingly abstract and aloof from human involvement.
From a short distance away, across the small gallery, Arm's paintings appear as brightly colored canvases, each washed by a single color. Closer up, we become aware of layers of color which fuse optically into a solid ground, onto which the artist has traced, with a tiny brush and in a lighter value, finely articulated patterns. One of these pieces (all are untitled) is defined by nothing more than the seemingly endless repetition of ocean waves, delicately scribed in subtle pinks and grays on a clear, azure-blue ground. Here, as in all of her other paintings, there is no focal point, no place where the eye comes to rest in its scan of the plane of the ocean as it swells and falls and tilts back to infinity. In the introduction to the catalogue for the exhibition, Claire Daigle correctly observes about this painting that its "effect is pacific; one stands steady before it, subdued and entranced, like Friedrich's monk before the imponderable expanse of the ocean." Two more of Arm's paintings (one a subdued gray-green and the other a deep pine-green), were apparently inspired by receding expanses of closely cropped grass. Their surfaces are woven with layers of color and then stitched with a blinding profusion of staccato brush marks, each representing a single blade of grass. Another piece (evidently the artist's favorite, judging from its reproduction on the catalogue's cover and twice more inside) is a blazing field of orange overlaid with crisp yellow lines which arch and curl upward in an organic growth motif. And in yet another painting, the artist's assiduity, and fondness for excessively repeated pattern, is aptly demonstrated in her depiction of tiny water droplets forming, as if by condensation, on a dense, purple ground. There is no question that these are handsome paintings. Sometimes, however, art can be too easy to like. Arm's work teeters on a dicey edge—her ability to maintain the balance makes this show a success.