The title of the exhibition, Cattleships and Bruisers, is a play on the title of the child’s game, Battleships and Cruisers, referencing at once the violence that forms our culture’s backdrop as well as the miscues that are a part of our attempts at communicating with each other. In a number of the drawings, made over this past winter, Gillmore has added figurative elements to the earnestly bumbling (visually) “street” aphorisms that are a signature of his work.

Overall, these new drawings hover between an excoriation of, and a kind of bitterly sincere tribute to our contemporary “wild west”. The rootin’-tootin’ politician, “shady ladies” and saguaro cacti hung with license plates, such emblems, at once nostalgic and perennial, are presented in crude, cartoon-ish, pastel and neon vividness. They mingle with stencil-like letters that form, variously, darkly suggestive truck-stop bon mots or pretty girl, podunk-town and/or race-car names whose stencil-like simplicity recall tattoos, road signs or bathroom graffiti.

That Gillmore seems as enamored with as he does horrified of it all perhaps explains the unexpected, even lilting sense of innocence pervading these dynamic and grimly canny works, whose real subject seems to be that unctuous and dangerous homeland that’s always promising, or reminding us, that we belong there.