Deborah Buck’s Into the Wild: To Crash is Divine, curated so thoughtfully by Jennifer Baahng at La Mama Galleria, connects the thinking-through process of drawing to the loose shaping of crowds and identity. Buck’s work breaks down the boundaries between modes of cartooning and abstraction to operate as covert satire. Between her figurescapes and phase shifts of pastiche, Buck generates erased zones of gray that she then utilizes as an important formal resource. By revealing the trace and shadow of her expressive hand, she makes the evidence of her thinking and the provisional sense of community her subject, allowing the shadows and index of drawing to form productive tension with flat color.

“I don’t want to be a windup girl,” Deborah Buck told me in her studio, pointing to a female creature with a crank sticking out of her back in the left-hand corner of a recent painting. Buck graciously walked me through the body of work heading to her solo show at La MaMa Galleria, a nonprofit gallery and an extension of the experimental theater club of the same name founded in 1961 by Ellen Stewart in New York City’s East Village. These are some of Buck’s most extensive works to date, and this is the first time she has gone beyond the two-dimensional format. She refers to them as murals, which she creates by dissecting elements from previous works and collaging them to produce layered scenes populated by hybrid figures occupying the panoramic drama of history painting. These creatures wear pearls around their necks; they chomp monster-like teeth that mimic the same string of ivory beads; their painted bodies drip down the paper’s surface. The context of La MaMa Galleria is fitting with its affiliation to the theater, as Buck speaks of these beings as a cast of characters.  —Tanya Merrill