SKYPOMP DEBUTS DOWNTOWN

by Emma Riva

As of this past weekend, Pittsburgh has a new gallery. For the first few years I lived here, this wasn’t a statement I heard often. But I heard it said first about here, then Romance, then April April—and now Skypomp downtown.

Skypomp is an artist-run space that’s a project of Geoffrey Callahan, Jeremiah Gregory, and Zach Milder (“just like the salsa,” he said as a mnemonic for last name.) The debut show is Walls Not Included, Callahan’s own work—and Skypomp is starting off with a bang. Though a few of the works hang on the wall, the majority hang freely off wires on the ceiling. It creates the effect of wandering through a forest made of canvases and breathes some life into the work.

The paintings in Walls Not Included ask what we can learn from the space between things, between the ego and the self, between the self and the other, and between the viewer and the work of art.

Skypoomp is below the office space of a lawyer with a penchant for collecting vintage Italian posters. What is now the gallery was his in-house frame for those posters, originally called “Dough Boy,” but it had laid vacant for years after the attorney’s retirement. The space allows for large works, and the team made use of all of it for Walls Not Included. Callahan had to slide the largest of them in through the window

Callahan is from Pittsburgh originally, and his collaborators—both fellow artists and both classmates from Pitzer college—accompanied him to start him to start the gallery. Gregory moved full time to the city, where Milder lives in New York. They plan to bring national artists from their network but also make use of the gallery as a project space for their own practices.

In Callahan’s paintings, i saw echoes of Stanton McDonald Wright and the “synchromy” art movement, which looked to emulate the dynamism of music and dance through abstract geometric colors. (Wright is also the mind behind the only male nude painting in the Carnegie Museum of Art, Sunrise Synchromy in Violet).

A theme in Callahan’s paintings is the use of negative space. They’re literally suspended in the air, allowing visitors to walk between them and see the backs of the canvases, where bruises-like color stains through. Almost all the work uses tapered white geometric shapes on a color field background,

Sky Pomp also has one of the most unique floors I’ve seen in any gallery., checkered in a black and white art deco style. The floor becomes a part of the art viewing, creating a shimmering trompe l’oeil type effect where the shapes undulate.

Some of Callahan’s work are eye-level, others waist-level. In that way, the work celebrates the different ways people respond to it. Callahan referenced the concept of “seeing the art space as an art form” and the paintings work both with the space and each other. The paintings blend into each other suspended in the air. At times, you could only see gallerygoers’ feet or heads.

Callahan’s work uses painterly techniques on the canvas, but also is keenly aware of how the paintings relate to what’s around them. Sky Pomp itself re orients you—it’s below street level, so you look up and see the sidewalk. Part of what’s refreshing about the gallery is how many surprises there are in the room. Wandering around can reveal an exposed brick wall or a tiny enclave under a window with smaller work. It’s a gallery room that rewards curiosity, and it’s easy to see how many different configurations of work could exist in it.

It feels, for the city, like enough of a bedrock now exists for new spaces to move in. Pittsburgh has had many more DIY spaces but few more institutionally backed commercial galleries. Skypomp is a true artist-run space where experimentation is encouraged, walking the line between a non-profit, gritty gallery and a white-cube commercial one. Pittsburgh now has some presence in the art world, which allows for there to be a clearer dichotomy between the two types of spaces and for both to thrive. If you avoided downtown for the NFL draft and the marathon, you now have more than enough of a reason to go.

Walls Not Included runs through May 10 at 301 Smithfield Street.

This month’s articles are generously supported by Lewis Hine Pictures America at the Frick. Discover photography’s radical capacity through May 17. Tickets now on sale.