Roundabouts Now presents Levels of Hardness, a two person exhibition of sculpture and painting by AJ Liberto and Erik Daniel White. For this exhibition, the gallery facilitated a series of studio visits between the artists, creating a valuable dialogue that allowed each artist’s body of work to grow amidst their shared fascinations. This model weaves together two very different artists through the identification of a shared core question asked by each in their respective processes: How do we process the bullshit we have to carry?

The resulting exhibition delves into tropes of masculinity and presents a multifaceted portrait of the artists’ shared anxieties around contemporary social and personal crises. The works presented in Levels of Hardness reckon with themes as towering as the tension between labor and technology, and as personal as understanding rifts between generations. 

AJ Liberto, a sculptor, builds Tatlin-like towers out of delicate wood slats and then drops rocks on them, building out new growth around the damage, the way a tree might grow around a barbed wire fence. His sense of precise craft speaks to his fascination with the trade of machining and its artisanal-industrial origins. Alongside these towers of repaired damage, Liberto presents a series of “Goblin Carts.” His carts are austerely laid out with a mix of actual tools as well as items of no use that have been machined by Liberto and frankensteined into now sculptural objects that feel as if they must have some purpose - a practice of art making that shows none of the artists hand but draws attention to the fact that nearly everything we think of as “machine-made” is in fact, carefully made by unseen hands. The carts reference machinist “jewelry boxes”, where machinists, traditionally male and of a trade that is being lost to technology, keep their most precise tools, oiled and cared for with tender attention. 

Erik Daniel White’s series of paintings of clay maquettes depict stark military scenes, stylizing weapons of war in clay, which are then photorealistically painted. White’s use of soft sculptural never-dry clay seems almost rendered by a child’s hand and transforms the iconic military subject matter into a dreamscape of the dark realities of war. The tanks and soldiers he depicts in paintings such as “Tat,Tat,Tat” could be toys if not for the pathos and loneliness they evoke. The placid scenes of clay soldiers rendered in vivid colors are contrasted with black voids of background. White’s virtuosity as a painter is on full display in the detailed rendering of the subjects but even more so in a depth of the voids. Using a technique reminiscent of Rembrant, he builds up the blacks using pure hues to achieve an unmatched depth. Along with the series of military scenes, White offers These Drugs Aren’t Working, a painting of the Wong-Baker Pain scale for children which ties together a sub-theme of the work. From childhood, Americans are often given pathways where true choice is an illusion. The question: “How much pain are you feeling right now?” marks the mental and physical toll that both the opioid epidemic and the military industrial complex have taken on American society. The ouroboros of youth to soldier to veteran to addict can be felt lurking in the void. 

In addition to individual artworks for sale in the show, Roundabouts Now offers some awesome bespoke merch in honor of the exhibition. We are excited to have commissioned limited edition t-shirts as well as editioned prints by AJ Liberto that feature excerpts of his exceptional drawings. You can bring These Drugs Aren’t Working by Erik Daniel White home with you in the form of a set of six mugs, allowing you to ask yourself daily how you are feeling.