Steve Novick’s (clockwise from left) The Pill; Epitaph; Cemetery Table
Images used by permission of the artist
Steve Novick’s work balances delicately on the seesaw of paradox. It is subversive but reverent, iconic but mundane, simple but complex. To me, these tensions make him an acute commentator on religious rituals and language.
In The Pill (2024), Novick deploys a cutting board to suggest a face, tongue extended to receive a puck of medicine or perhaps the eucharistic host. Three slabs of found wood are sufficient to pose probing questions. Is communion a form of placebo or does it offer a spiritual panacea? Who has placed this wafer on the tongue? Has the viewer become the priest, sacralizing the gallery experience, or are we invited to take this mysterious pill from the artist?
Many of Novick’s recent works meditate on death and memory, inducing appreciative smirks that ripen into philosophical quandaries. In Epitaph (2022), a marble slab has a few bars of black rubber pasted across its surface, suggesting the black mark of a redactor’s pen. This censorious touch suggests the despotic reach of autocracy, effacing identity even unto death. But the work is no prisoner to our present political moment. It also reminds us that however pridefully specific our lives may appear, the details are—in the grander scheme—inconsequential, fading to black.
