"If Love Could Have Saved You, You Would Have Lived Forever"

Rob Hauschild and Becky Smith, Funny to Burn, detail

Photograph: Courtesy the Artist and Bellwether, New York

Despite its schmaltzy title, “If Love Could Have Saved You, You Would Have Lived Forever” is a truly touching survey of the many different ways in which art can tackle the universal need to grieve. The show combines gallery owner Becky Smith’s personal collection of mourning objects with pieces by artists, who, in some cases, offer testimonials to friends or family members they’ve lost.

The exhibit kicks off with Rob Hauschild’s and Becky Smith’s Funny to Burn, a fantastic accumulation of the sort of paper effigies—taking the form of everything from woks to blingy sneakers—cremated as offerings to the dead in Chinese Taoist funerals. In Tanyth Berkeley’s and Todd Chandler’s spare, commemorative video, Justice for Brad Will, the subject, an activist and filmmaker, can be seen standing atop a doomed Manhattan squat in a series of grainy clips. The work resonates with a sense of unfinished business: Will was shot and killed at the age of 36 during a teacher’s strike in Oaxaca, Mexico by gunmen believed to be local officials.

Leela Devi’s 9/11 has arguably the most interesting backstory of any work in the show. The 62-year-old folk artist, who is from a remote village in the Mithila region between India and Nepal, had never seen images of the traumatic event. Yet her drawing of the planes crashing into the towers, based solely on descriptions she heard of what had happened, is powerfully empathetic. It’s a prime example of art’s ability to capture the transcendence of death, even from far away.