Scott Albrecht's New Translations at Subliminal Projects

Scott Albrecht’s New Translations has had plenty of attention online since it opened at Subliminal Projects on 19 November 2016, and it is easy to see why. Part of it is the address: Subliminal is the Echo Park gallery run by Shepard Fairey, and a show there is noticed. The larger part is that the work is very good indeed. It runs until 7 January 2017.

Who he is

Albrecht was born in New Brunswick, New Jersey, in 1983, took a degree in graphic design at the Art Institute of Philadelphia in 2003, and works in Brooklyn, where he is a member of the Gowanus Studio Space. His practice joins three things that rarely sit together: woodworking, hand-drawn lettering and geometric collage. Each wooden piece starts life as a drawing and then goes through hours of exacting production. A single work can contain dozens or hundreds of separate parts, each cut, sanded and painted before being fitted back together, often at slightly different depths so the surface steps in and out.

The largest piece here, Nothing Succeeds in Which High Spirits Play No Part, borrows its title from Nietzsche. It measures roughly five feet by two and a half and is assembled from 345 pieces of wood.

Further from legibility

Looking back at Albrecht’s work from a couple of years ago, including the pieces that went with a 2015 interview in Hi-Fructose, makes the progress plain. The palette has grown richer and the lettering and layouts tighter, yet the vision is recognisably the same one. That consistency is worth something in a field where artists often reinvent themselves for each new gallery.

The gallery describes the show as a turn towards the abstract, and that is accurate. Almost everything is still built from words, but the words are deliberately hard to read: hidden by strong blocks of colour, broken up by changes of depth, set into uneven grids, or run together without spaces. The title refers to recent events, private and public, that made what had felt normal suddenly irrelevant and demanded a fresh way of looking.

The clearest measure of progress is the text abstractions. When Albrecht showed at Andenken Gallery in Amsterdam in the summer of 2015, for the exhibition Here and Now, these abstracted wooden slogans, each a kind of riddle, were a fairly new direction for him. A year and a half later, near enough, the idea has been refined into compositions that are thoroughly assured.

Cheerful without being twee

The mood throughout is positive, though never in the greeting-card sense. Albrecht’s work has always been upbeat, but it avoids being cute or precious and never talks down to the viewer. That tone is harder to hold than it looks, and the new work holds it.

It is also obvious that Albrecht treated the show as the opportunity it was. A solo exhibition at a respected Los Angeles gallery is a big chance, and he met it with total commitment, bringing his mix of fine joinery, drawn type and bright geometry to a city and a venue that could appreciate the labour involved. The reward is deserved.

The ink pieces

Somewhat unexpectedly, the strongest works in the room are not the elaborate wooden riddles, good as they are. They are a set of pared-back ink drawings on parchment, where the same interest in letterforms and spacing is carried by a pen and nothing else. Without the colour and the depth to hold the eye, the drawing has to do all the work, and it does. They suggest a direction that could run alongside the woodwork for years.

A 92-page hardback of Albrecht’s work, published by Valley Cruise Press, came out to coincide with the opening. It covers old and new pieces, with a foreword by the writer and New York Times editor Robb Todd and an interview conducted by Hyland Mather of Andenken Gallery. Shepard Fairey’s own site carried the announcement of New Translations lists the dates and the details of the book.