"Dirty: Work by Paul Nudd and Casey Ann Waseniewski," which closed Sunday, presented an oddly, almost too-perfect paring of artists working in painting and sculpture respectively. Nudd is well known in the art community here as the poet laureate of filthy aesthetics.

As long as I have known his work, Nudd has been captivated by a formal investigation of all things rotten. You can recognize the hallmarks of a Nudd in the fine line work, and specific details that reference soft, round organic forms such as worms, slugs, mold, spoors, insect larvae and bacteria. It is telling that he never involves things like arms or legs, wings or bits of exoskeletal bugs. The organisms here are primordial, where the fluids and growths all melt into one another; is this a series of blobs of moss, algae, slugs or a rotting animal? Maybe it is all of that, sort of, floating on the surface of a stagnant puddle, performing a little feat of visual wonder. It becomes an interesting terrain to move about in. The paintings in "Dirty" mark for Nudd a major step forward in his work. Moving further away from early, small works of tiny intricate drawings, and onto large scale paintings, Nudd has begun to incorporate physical elements that reference, or literally are, akin to what his work deals with, namely crust, dust, dirt, hair and so on.

From left to right: Paul Nudd, the death of talking dogs (c. 1313), 2007/08, mixed media collage on canvas, 76 × 120 in., Casey Ann Wasniewski, Brobdingnagian Caliginous Substratum Scarum, 2008, wool, industrial felt, and horse hair, 8 × 45 × 22 in., and Paul Nudd, black sub-dung slugs, 2007/08, mixed media collage on canvas, 74 × 112 in.

This new vein began when working with Erik Brown and Annika Seitz for a show the California Occidental Museum of Art, which has since closed. Preparing for a show at COMA, the apartment space which hosted 18 exhibitions between 2006 and 2008, Nudd collected all the detritus swept up in preparation for the next show. From this he made a small group of paintings called COMA Crust. This sort of process has continued with the work seen in Dirty, except on a much larger scale.

Seemingly straightforward black on raw canvas paintings reveal hidden secrets upon closer in inspection. It is almost as if we can, like a microscope, look at an organism, and zoom in infinitely to see all the various bugs, creatures and bacteria living in a sample of pond scum. Tiny intricate drawings have been cut up and collaged to the canvases. Clusters of seeds, hair and string form constellations of interest. What is so compelling about these is how they are able to work as both serious historically motivated paintings, see Clifford Still, for example, but continue in Nudd’s interest in organic processes and inventive use of material.

Casey Ann Wasniewski’s sculptural forms at first appear to have sprung right out of Nudd’s paintings. As if the concentrated clusters had grown to such a mass as to split off from the whole and form a new being. In that sense, Wasniewski’s creations can be seen as the next step on the evolutional chain, having emerged from the primordial stew that is Nudd’s painting practice. Wasniewski’s pieces also feature the formal traits of an amorphous blob that’s sprung patches of hair. Like Nudd Wasniewski’s work feels vaguely familiar. These objects look like some sort of essential organism or related thing we’ve seen many times before, like a sick blood cell, a rock formation from a cave or something from the ocean. These pieces hint at a shared lived experience we humans have. They hint at a moment in our ancient history that we feel when we see a crocodile, or a dinosaur skeleton. It is something mysterious, but something, that since we too are natives of the planet earth, can sort of understand.

-- Erik Wenzel