“Andrea Geyer: Manifest” at Hales, New York: Art Exhibition Review

“Andrea Geyer: Manifest,” a new, ongoing exhibition at the art gallery Hales in New York City, rips across the exhibition space, instantly resonating outside of its walls.

The exhibition features a series of white banners with silver lettering stitched into place on each. The banners pack a series of messages demanding a refresh on the role of museums and similar arts institutions in surrounding community life — focusing more on the individual rather than an enforced order in either the present or in looks at collective history.

“Andrea Geyer: Manifest” at Hales

With no punctuation and in all caps (at least in the English messages), the neatly arranged, horizontal rows of light-responsive lettering that roll out these calls to action shine unrestrained: a spotlight, though focused not at the viewer/visitor but instead outwards. The straightforward visual rhythm of each banner in the exhibition is welcoming, honestly — offering anyone who stops by a (metaphorical) seat for the fast-moving exhibition’s trek. The artwork is visually uplifting, down to the rhythmic succinctness of each individual banner itself, hanging starkly on its aluminum tubing and stainless steel bracket connecting it to the wall.

And the specific messages on the banners further this feeling of being supportively propelled forward.

Geyer calls attention to social calamity and opportunities to address it, in both general and somewhat specific terms.

“I demand a museum that offers free food, a bathroom, and education,” says an unfurled banner in the latter group. “I want a museum to feel its own floors tremble when others are destroyed in war,” adds another. A third banner pushes for the archetypal museum to “remember everything,” and in context, that “everything” points to a truly broad sweep of the human experience, moment by moment and place by place. Geyer’s art looks towards the horror and the bliss, all of it infused into real-world individuals’ journeys through our societies and the world. Geyer’s banners are demanding honesty.

The visual look the artist chose for this project pushes out the contained messages with rollicking earthquakes of force.

The banners start pulling visually upwards from the moment of first encounter, centering the nature and placement of the materials, which range from permeable to jarring.

Shining, Clarion Calls to Action

Behind the content of the messages, I also felt like the tangible, gently pulsating waves of the fabric infused Geyer’s art with a burst of care.

Though blasting like a trumpet, Geyer’s works are also steeped in gentility. The artful bursts are big and bold while offering clarity and directness, something flowing upwards but easily graspable: a sweeping wave of presence that’s simultaneously light to the point it’s easily moved by air flowing in the room. As displayed here, the banners were held in place only by a bar at the top.

Everything was forward and at the ready, materials all supporting each other within each finished piece. Hales explained in a press release that Geyer’s choice of materials connects to the use of fabric protest signs by suffragettes.

The waves of white and reflective silver letters hearken to actual, real-world light — which tends to shine, forcefully, spreading across available space and performing, essentially, physical feats. Light will fill a space, if a source is there, and Geyer’s messages aesthetically do not stop, instead both referentially and on their own shining indefinitely onward.

The artist also incorporates the concepts of “art” and a “museum” into these visual tableaux, casting the two as basic, human needs shared among us on an individual, personal, and internal level, just as such individuals would need sustenance, shelter, and support.

I think that’s a realistic viewpoint on what “art” always is, or at least can be, beneath the surface of the artifice sometimes attached to it. Whatever the specifics, art is sometimes considered something separate from the regular flow of everyday life.

Here, for Geyer, the two are inseparable, as is the present from the past and the lived experience of some community with that of another, suffering group. The shine is the same across these messages. It’s a relentless, buoying unity. History lives in synchronicity with the present, art lives with the human need for care and support, and the possibility of real, substantive progress coexists with the present moment in which lacks remain. And with the visual consistency, you can’t help but believe in it.

The Person, and the Community

There are no breaks, no moments of redirection, and no stopping points (thanks in part to the lack of punctuation!).

Everything flows together, meeting in a shining stream that envisions the individual experience of living in connection with a surrounding community and its institutions as something where mutually uplifting support is both possible and critical. The forces are relatively equal on both sides of that equation and all sides of the other ones, a unifying meeting and intermingling of these corners of experience.

And you feel the palpable want for this kind of thing when amid Geyer’s works. The free-flowing and impactful force is front and center — vulnerability included. The underlying push towards this brighter, uplifting world is gnawing in its intensity and continuation.

Grammatically, again at least in the English messages, much of Geyer’s messaging was in an active voice — something oriented towards the future and the possibilities of what can be literally or metaphorically constructed to support those in need among us.

And aesthetically, it’s the same. Geyer’s work moves with reverberating, focused direction. The focus is clearly — again — on positive, uplifting construction, with rows of text that build atop each other and banners that together speak with a united voice.

“Andrea Geyer: Manifest” continues through December 20, 2024, at Hales, New York.

Featured image: “Andrea Geyer: Manifest” (installation view), Hales, New York, November 2 – December 20, 2024. Image courtesy of Hales.