Home on the Range and Beyond

Some artists have an outsize talent at capturing the essence of a place—think of Monet’s Giverny, with its iridescent water lillies, or the potently Californian city—and landscapes of Richard Diebenkorn. In Chelsea a pair of solo shows from contemporary artists are powerfully evocative of very different locales—the American West and Haifa, Israel—and each in its own way makes us reconsider preconceived notions about those places.

At Harper’s (512 West 22nd Street), in what might be a case of nominative determinism, Chloe West is showing a stunning suite of surrealist paintings that play into western mythology while also subverting it. Here we see traditional symbols of cattle hands, trappers and others who braved the wilderness in the hope of better lives: tumbling dice from a seedy saloon, a red-accented gambler hat, rifle casings and knives. But Ms. West deploys these icons of national expansion in unexpected ways—her ultra-saturated canvases feel more like polished, Instagram-filtered images than depictions of the dusty trail, and instead of typical scenes of bucking broncs, cattle drives and lonesome cacti she offers pensive portraits and mysterious still lifes. 

These are deeply personal images—the human figures we see are self-portraits, and throughout the show Ms. West is no doubt channeling the Wyoming where she was born (Cheyenne) and educated (Laramie). She upends expectations about what a cowpoke looks like, swapping the rugged man of the plains with her feminine visage, but does so without losing any of the fierceness we associate with those figures. She sternly sizes us up from under the brim of a hat in one painting; in another she threateningly licks the edge of a pocket knife. 

Ms. West riffs on art history as well. She draws on Georgia O’Keeffe and religious art in “St. Veronica at the Geyser Basin” (2024-25), which centers on a pair of hands grasping a lilac cloth. Unlike in traditional depictions of the titular saint, though, the fabric features not an image of Jesus but a floating, three-dimensional deer skull. Elsewhere, in “Cowboy Philosopher” (2024-25), she seems to nod both to depictions of St. Jerome and to Raphael’s portraiture, with her central figure, backed by a striking, open sky, pointing at an animal skull on a table. If the mythos of the American West has long been set in stone, Ms. West chisels it free with her alluring paintings, bringing new perspectives and new life to an old subject.

A few blocks down on W. 19th Street, at SLAG&RX, Naomi Safran-Hon continues her long-running engagement with the city of Haifa, Israel, where she was raised. Exploring notions of home, displacement, dilapidation and rebirth, she uses a unique process to create her sculptural canvases, photographing the interiors of abandoned buildings and enlarging the pictures, puncturing and altering their surfaces, overlaying them with lace and other fabrics, and pushing cement through the images. 

The results of all this are riveting works of contrast, the hardness of the stalactite-like cement protrusions cohabiting with delicate bands of lace; the richly hued, brightly lighted spaces initially appear inviting, but as the details of their disuse slowly emerge they take on a more sorrowful timbre. These can be read as carefully composed, formalist works—the slanting checkerboard of what appears to be a collapsed ceiling in “Bends of Wood Grid (Turquoise Room)” (2023) pops off the canvas, as the negative space created by an adjacent doorway draws us in. But Ms. Safran-Hon’s greatest strength is her ability to softly probe the fragile histories of Haifa.

While some artists have rushed to stake out positions on the most recent conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, Ms. Safran-Hon has been creating her images for over a decade, and this lengthy dedication to the subject comes through in thoughtful works of art that avoid polemics, focusing on humanity and not headlines. Certainly a fluency in the region’s history, the 1948 Arab-Israeli War and the current situation in the Middle East brings gravity to her creations. But even absent that, one feels a deep respect for the places she depicts, a reverence for people made more potent by their absence.

The doorways in “Two Exits” (2023) are both inviting, one leading to a sunny space, the other to a warm mustard-colored room. Amid the dilapidation, they offer hopeful promises for the future, and a reminder of our agency in choosing a path forward. Flowers sprout from the base of a crumbling wall in another image. It’s a sign of perseverance and beauty in the face of hardship, a sanguine message that transcends any specific place or time—Brian P. Kelly