MARCY BRAFMAN / TRUTH OR CONSEQUENCES

May 15 - June 7, 2008

532 gallery

532 west 25th street, 2nd floor

Marcy Brafman’s paintings deal with the dark and light of the cultural landscape and the nature of character. They reflect on the demons and deities of the memory as seen on television, billboards, boxtops, catechisms, illustrated classic comic books, masterpieces in the Frick, old paperback covers, graffiti and signage on moving vehicles and packaging detritus of every shape and kind. Concern with brand identity as a genuine spiritual state plays a strong role in the work, an examination of painting as a mirror to internal and external states, individual and social intentions. Each painting represents a logo poem, a distillation of an array of ideas into a simple painted statement. Each one plays a character in a private cast alphabet.

These paint driven works portray good and evil, ascension, escape, truth, myth, judgment, consequence and destiny. One Shot oil enamel and spray paint form these works. Glossy in their toxicity, pummeled into image, their root meaning and references allow the viewer access to the idiom of old time sign painters and street artists.

{Statement by Artist}

ASKEVOLD/HUTCHINSON

PETER HUTCHINSON

DAVID ASKEVOLD

Article Projects at 532 Gallery

532 West 25th Street, 2nd floor 917.701.3338

www.532gallery.com March 27 - April 20, 2007

Opening Reception: Thursday, March 27, 6-9 PM

We are pleased to announce an exhibition featuring two pioneer conceptual artists, David Askevold and Peter Hutchinson, who have established the connections between language, the found photographic moment; and an interaction with nature and the intricacies of the mind between actual and intellectual experience. Though Hutchinson has an ecologic sensibility and Askevold a metaphysical one, both of their oeuvres has added something distinct, useful, and inspired to the practice of Conceptualism.

The actual works, on close inspection, are as different as they can be. Askevold has crafted, in his “Ambit” series, a group of images that combine visual and linguistic meaning—that is, photographic images that evoke phastasmagoria (lights blinking; the shadow of an art being slowly waved; water beading across a surface as it slowly turns into ice; silhouettes of abstract seeming objects projected and then documented) and language that is so unbelievably dense that it approaches mere verbal ambiguity; another form of abstraction that can in a perverse way be appreciated only for its sound and not for its sense. The words are burned into the photographic images, which are zoomed in and therefore indistinct.

On the other hand, Hutchinson’s works are intensely intimate, combining an almost leisurely style of photographic evidence that is combined on large white sections of museum board with drawings and text that is handwritten, resembling a diary. His subjects are man’s position in relation to nature, which he investigates in a number of ways: hiking and eating off the land in his “Foraging” series; laying a path of bread crumbs (actually Wonder bread) on the lip of an active volcano; combining drawings, photographs, and a short text to recount an understanding of pure natural sublimity, when on a hiking trip be is surprised by sudden thunder in the middle of a bright blue sky.

This exhibition provides a simple snapshot of a period preceding our current one which was host to a myriad of approaches to man’s innate nature, his ability to feel and think, and to know meaning despite a confusion of the sensate or the cerebral. It brings the Conceptual back to us in ways that still instruct and inspire.

LOST HORIZON at HERTER GALLERY, UMASS AMHERST

(Dean Monogenis)
Courtesy of Stux Gallery

FEBRUARY 4-MARCH 4, 2008

Erik Benson, John Berens, Romain Erkiletlian, Michelle Hailey
Laura Harrison, Elizabeth Huey, Rebecca Kolsrud, Jeff Konigsberg
Michelle Mackey, Dana Melamed, Dean Monogenis , Asya Reznikov
Kristen Schiele, Kimberly Sexton, Mary Ann Strandell

“Lost Horizon” represents a critique of themes related to the professional practice and socialized ideal of architecture, its enveloping culture of construction, and the ironic ideals that emerge from assumptions of progress. I perceive these concepts through various artworks, mostly two dimensional and related to the practice of painting, which is mainly illusory in nature, and achieves a visual mythology of the constructed landscape in which the organizing principle of the natural world, its separation of time and place, is denied the chance to manifest in a proper manner. The discursive levels of such imagery aid us in approaching the larger themes at hand.

All of the artists in this exhibition are inhabitants of New York, so that any context related to architecture is also related to urbanism or to the iconic status of buildings as well as to the transient nature of city living. Not all the scenes depicted here are urban ones, and some seem not even to be real in any naturalistic manner. Yet the city does serve a role as a laboratory of such themes: perceiving what it means to live in a landscape that is in a state of constant flux, first in terms of outward appearance or beauty, second in the power systems supported by these appearances, and third by the sense of space that is transmuted by the interaction of so many disparate forms of expression. It’s no surprise that its manifestations in different art-works alternates radically between the real, the surreal, and the abstract.

The approach to an identifiable reality represented by the title of this exhibition is intentionally misleading. A play on words, the Lost in Lost Horizon is meant to imply an obscuring of truth rather than its being misplaced or misrepresented. There’s an old expression that “truth is in the details” but I be-lieve that the details can lie and that truth in often hidden amongst them. The same is true of a city, it is such a large place or context that it hides many truths while seeming to signify one large truth about progress and what it means to us.

(Michelle Hailey)



(Elizabeth Huey)




(Jeff Konigsberg)




(Kristen Schiele)



(Laura Harrison)
Courtesy of Paul Sharpe Gallery




(John Berens)




(Rebecca Kolsrud)



(Michelle Mackey)
Courtesy of Paul Sharpe Gallery



(Mary Ann Strandell)



(Asya Reznikov)



(Erik Benson)
Courtesy of Roebling Hall



(Romain Erkiletlian)
Courtesy of Gering & Lopez



(Dana Melamed)
Courtesy of Priska C. Juschka Fine Art



(Kimberly Sexton)

"TRUE TO FORM" at 532 GALLERY, JAN 18-FEB 10, 2008

532 West 25th Street, New York, NY 10001

Marcy Brafman, Jenny Carpenter, and Mary Murphy


MARCY BRAFMAN
"Flying Kewpie" (2006)
Oil enamel and spray paint
on canvas, 36 x 48 inches




JENNY CARPENTER
"Ampangorinana, Nosy Komba" (2007)
Oil on cherry panel, 40 1/8 x 30 1/2 inches




MARY MURPHY
“The Pool Boy Left His Shoes” (2007)
Oil on linen, 59 x 46 inches

MADE IN THE USA

The Sameness In Us by Juri Morioka

Curated by David Gibson

The Educational Alliance
197 East Broadway, New York

[One block East of where Canal and Essex Streets meet]

September 18-November 23, 2007

Shelly Bahl (Canada/India) Ula Einstein (Switzerland)
Nancy Friedemann (Colombia) Tine Kindermann (Germany)
Chang-jin Lee (Korea) Juri Morioka (Japan) Hannes Priesch (Austria)
Flavia Souza (Brazil) Yona Verwer (Netherlands)

The ‘USA’ of the title is a more rarified territory than one might think. Its area is measured in blocks, not square miles. But more than that, it is measured by the variety of nationalities that make residence here, and the tradition, however altered in recent years, of emigration. This exhibition explores the nature of idiosyncrasy in consideration of ideological and cultural definitions of identity. Who is the individual and how do many disparate entities become a single community? -- How does that community come to embody a meaningful representation of America? -- How do current events on both the local and global stage either affirm or challenge the values which such idiosyncratic entities actively will into existence? These are some of the questions posed by this exhibition, and perhaps answered by a thoughtful consideration of its works on view.

INSTALLATION IMAGES:
Yona Verwer


Yona Verwer


Juri Morioka

Juri Morioka



Ula Einstein



Ula Einstein



Ula Einstein



Hannes Priesch


Hannes Priesch




Chang-jin Lee

Nancy Friedemann

Nancy Friedemann

Nancy Friedemann

Flavia Souza

Flavia Souza

Garden Confrontations @ Dam Stuhltrager

"Garden Confrontations"

June 29-August 19,2007

Victoria Calabro, Chrissy Conant
Julianna Dail, Katherine Daniels, Mark Power

By Invitation Only @ Kinz, Tillou + Feigen

"By Invitation Only"

May 21-July 21,2007

Marcy Brafman, Leemour Pelli
Mark Power, Raven Schlossberg, Conrad Vogel

Marcy Brafman

Leemour Pelli

Conrad Vogel

SIGNS OF LIFE @ PLANET THAILAND

SIGNS OF LIFE
March 6–May 20, 2007

Jeanine Anthony, Jordan Buschur, Jamie Chiarello
Langdon Graves, Jac Lahav, Jesse Martin, John Monteith
Jeremy Olson, Purdy Eaton, Colette Robbins


PLANET THAILAND, 133 North 7th Street, Williamsburg
take L train to Bedford Ave and walk ¾ of a block west



Jeanine Anthony




Jordan Buschur




Jamie Chiarello




Langdon Graves



Jac Lahav




Jesse Martin




John Montheith



Jeremy Olson


Purdy-Eaton


Colette Robbins

This exhibition explores a subject matter, a generational attitude, and a population of overt talent all at once. The search for new experience always begins with a search for life, since it is life itself, in vernacular terms, which both defines and gives hope to the prospects of new experience. Life presents itself in a variety of means, and implies the possibility of communication. Each different life form impresses upon us a profound reinvention of what it means to originate, grow, thrive, take on habits and fulfill instincts, and create anew.

Nowhere do we see this as more overtly than in the labors of young artists. That said, all but two of the artists featured in “Signs of Life” are currently studying for their MFA at various New York area schools. Those two are still at a young enough age that their views and abilities match that of their peers in academic programs; they are all searching for meaning, and finding it in diverse sources that are either a result of their individual backgrounds, or which reside, and emerge, from formal and thematic discovery.

Like many artists today, the psychological and fantastic aspects of depiction stand in for the real or sensible, even when (and especially if) the realness of such images overpowers our ability to discern the potential value of the real. The expression in the title is common in science fiction stories when a spaceship first encounters a new world, the first thing they look for is evidence of intelligent life, the most initial suggestion of a human presence. But is there such a thing as a sensible reality, uninflected by irony or psychological complexity?

Leah Oates interviews David Gibson

What are your favorite shows that you have curated, and why? First I would have to decide what factor made one of my shows a favorite. The ones that seemed least likely to get pulled off, I suppose. These include my first two, SUGAR+SPICE and SOME (ARE) PAINTING; then three exhibitions which I co-curated at the Riva Gallery, EROTIKA, CARTOON, and BEAUTIFUL GROTESQUE. That same year also found me organizing my first exhibition for a university gallery, LIMINAL, and participating in an art fair with PRESENCE at Scope New York. In 2005 I curated EVERLAND for Annina Nosei, an art world legend and old family friend; in September of that year, my first regional nonprofit exhibition at Spaces Inc in Cleveland, Ohio, with BEAUTIFUL DREAMER which included 28 artists and was exhibited in a 3,800 square foot gallery. The entire show was shipped there and back, and a catalogue was also published.

How has your curating evolved from the beginning of your career to now? I don’t know if my curating has evolved so much as my reasons for doing it. The difference between a young dog and an old dog is mainly the value of experience. Though I’m by no means an old dog, I have learned a lot in the last seven years about the role of the curator, about the value of the specific experience linked to this role, and what it’s ultimately good for. What has changed is the nature of my relationship to the specific artists with whom I have become accustomed to dealing, and the galleries as well. My main interest these days is to find prospects for my exhibitions, and individually for some artists, in galleries of note, for critical and professional advancement; and at universities, for teaching and learning, as well as to travel. On a deeper level, I have come to realize the levels at which my reasons for curating connect with my reasons for writing about art, for studying literature and culture, and for writing about human experience in memoir and fiction.

What is your approach to curating? Do you start with an idea first and find artists or do you see art works first and then begin thinking about a show? How do you find artists to work with, in archives or through word or mouth? I don’t have a specific approach. Sometimes the ideas come from the synergy between random studio visits, from an exhibition which I visited and was displeased with, or from literary sources. I have to say that the first of these is my preferred method, because it’s left up to chance, and allows for introspection. I find artists everywhere, in group exhibitions, benefits, open studios, etc. These days I find more people through referrals than I once did. Sometimes I will do several studio visits with an artist before I deciide to include them in a group exhibition, and sometimes it happens right away, dependent upon the availability of circumstance. These days I tend to plan shows first and then sort out, from amongst the artists I already know, whom I would like to include; and then I ask a few of them for referrals to other people I would have considered had I known them at the time. I tend to think of the relationship between artist and curator as a conversation about ability and intentions, rather than as a pale-faced context for success or failure.

You grew up around art and are from a family with a long connection and love for the arts. How has that shaped you and how do you think the art world has changed? It’s not as much of a family in the arts as one might think. I have a father (John Gibson) who was an important gallerist in Soho from the early Sixties up until 2001. He exhibited the work of a number of seminal Conceptual artists, including Joseph Beuys, Marcel Broodthaers, Arman, Christo, Ben Vautier, Peter Hutchinson, James Carpenter, Jean Le Gac, Bill Beckley, William Childress, et al. In the Eighties and Nineties he also introduced the work of a variety of younger talents including John Armleder, Olivier Mosset, Bertrand Lavier, Eve Andree Laramee, Thom Merrick, Matthew McCaslin, Wolfgang Staehle, et al. He also collaborated with important curators of the period such as Collins & Milazzo. Of course, I was away at college during much of this. It was only when visiting home now and then that I would get a glimpse of what was going on. The most good that it did me was to help form the manner of my thinking about art, equivalent to the intellectual level of art graduate school, but without all of the political agendas that such a situation involves. I saw artists as real people, and as artists they were successful, communicative, and often collaborative. My father’s gallery, and the few other galleries showing their work, like Daniel Newburg, Sandra Gering, and Annina Nosei, were the locus of this community, and there was little evidence of the rampant bohemianism, critical of everyone and everything in the upper echelons of the art business, that I find in many artists today. The artist as loser is a very unattractive trait. We have to build communities that operate at all levels of the art world, and artists have to travel and see how things work in other places. They also have to respect the people who run galleries. This is a business in which almost everyone is self-made, and they do it because art inspires them. Of course there are trends in taste, and market forces such as real estate and the power of national currencies, that drive business. But it’s all about relationships, and they have to be nurtured from both sides.

You do a lot of studio visits and actively look at artists work and you are very artist-friendly. Why do you think that other curators are not so artist-friendly and are not accessible to artists? Is there any way for artist to approach such individuals? Many of the younger set of professional people in the art world are in it for their careers. Either they come from a business background or have struggled up from minor gallery jobs to positions of some authority. Their main experience has not been in face-to-face contact with artists, except those who are affiliated with the institution where they work. They possess an institutional mentality which also serves as a defense mechanism against too much experience that is not guided by the right precepts. Also, many curators are also artists, and perhaps there is a creeping criticality that really emerges from competing agendas which they have not surmounted. I wish there were less hyphenated professionals. Everywhere I look there are artist-critics, artist-curators, artist-gallerists. Many gallerists began as artists and gave it up because they found their talents lay in business. This includes a number of individuals whom you might not suspect, such as Robert Miller, Matthew Marks, and Jeffrey Deitch. Also, many young art professionals are in love with what they see as they glamour of the art world, the beautiful people and trends restaurants. This is reinforced by reports in various art publications that celebrate sex, money, parties, and the like. I always say that I’m not a star, I’m a worker, and I want to meet and collaborate with other workers. Stars burn out. I would say that you should keep working and maybe they will contact you. If not, then not. It just wasn’t in the cards.

What advice would you give to artists who want to show in New York? Since I’m both a lifelong art world participant and an native New Yorker, I am perhaps not the best person to ask. I am also not an artist. You should write to successful artists through their galleries and ask their advice. Flash Art also publishes a guide called “Art Diary” that includes the home addresses of many well-known artists, critics, etc, around the world. Read “The Art Dealers” by Laura de Coppet and Alan Jones (Soho Press) to introduce you to the mindset of many contemporary, and some historical gallerists. When you visit the city see as much as you can and attend lectures, docent tours, etc. Meet people here and keep up with them when you’re back from wherever else you live. It helps to know people, not only for connections, but to see New York as a real place inhabited by real people.

What do you think of the art market and of the proliferation of art fairs right now? Talking about the art market doesn’t generally help artists in any way. If you want to be a statistic, then live like one. If not, then not. There have always been art fairs, and there are more of them now because an industry exists to maintain them. They also generate a fair amount of talk, and are social events where people from different parts of the world meet to do business.

SQUARED

The Ernest Rubinstein Gallery at The Educational Alliance

197 East Broadway at Jefferson Street, New York

December 6, 2006 – January 11, 2007

Peter Barrett, Caroline Burton, Jeff Feld
Danielle Mysliwiec, Keiko Narahashi
Mary Ann Strandell, Bradley Wester, John Zinsser

PETER BARRETT

SQUARED engages the cultural significance of the right angle, a supposition of orderliness and authority in all matters intuitive. The artists participating in this exhibition have taken it upon themselves to confront the quality of disinterested hegemony which right-angled forms represent. In some cases, they have attended to the interior area of the square, producing labyrinths, while others have found inspiration in replicating the silhouette of this primary form in quantum varieties and progressions; others still have applied their interest to the visual form of the grid, in which minimal forms intersect with utility and coalesce in each segment with a degree of infinite perception, as if they were measurements of time rather than space. The artist’s role as an interlocutor of cultural aims is made tangent to the compartmentalized mentality of a businesslike society, achingly sensible and orderly yet inherently obsessive. The square forms that inhabit these art works relate to the mathematical syustems responsible for architecture, the internet, and methods of government structure and social control. They are both a fulcrum and a vortex, guarding against mystery while providing it as well.

CAROLINE BURTON


JEFF FELD


DANIELLE MYSLIWIEC


KEIKO NARAHASHI

MARY ANN STRANDELL

BRADLEY WESTER

JOHN ZINSSER

GAE SAVANNAH IN SCULPTURE MAGAZINE

The following review by D. Dominick Lombardi of Gae Savannah's exhibition at Dam Stuhltrager was published in the September 2006 issue of Sculpture Magazine.

Gae Savannah’s art is precious. It links to a trait that we all seem to have, especially in this day and age—the desire to find treasure. In looking at Savannah’s work, I am reminded of an experience that recently sprang to mind when my 10-year daughter showed me a rock with shiny little flecks of mica and announced with great glee, “Dad, I found gold!” I was transported to my own youth, to the moment when I had found an eerily similar rock and asked my father if I had found gold.

It took a while before I gave up on that rock—and the chance I might stumble upon something of great value has never left me. I relay this story because it relates directly to what I see in Savannah’s works, which have a reverence for the common object, funneled, in this case, through cultural reference and manipulated scale. The cultural reference is easy to see. Just look at Nhanshhe or Niu Kua and you will find distinct Asian properties such as architectural lines, fabric types, and meditative forms. Savannah also tests the viewer’s ability to place these works in time since many eras are loosely referenced.

Her most effective skill is to control scale by massing many examples of a familiar object, such as candy-colored beads and hair clips, into compelling forms and structures. The best example is Laika—an intriguing work made up of an elevated, ceremonial-looking enclosure that has extensive reach of influence by way of ritual procession and regal elevation. The hierarchy here projects a substantive reorientation of form and function based on flexible beliefs and universal appeal.

Works such as Shasta and Nyassa are the most confounding and difficult to read. They subtly suggest the aforementioned visual traits, but they seem more secretive and guarded in their meaning. In fact, Shasta, which is mostly veiled and lit from within, looks more like a stained glass obelisk than any functional structure. Nyassa tends more toward abstraction, even Modernism, by balancing texture, line, form, and color equally. The four segments in Nyassa, for me, create a tension that is hard to make peace with because it has no central focus. Perhaps Savannah is adding a bit of defiance to keep us on our toes.

Kisu, Paroxysm, and Satresine lean more toward the decorative, having a less ritualistic feel. However, they still maintain an appeal because they challenge preconceived notions relative to form and function. I suspect that curator David Gibson had this is mind when you factor in the oddly framed layout of the cigar-store-type gallery space.

Whatever reasons Savannah has for making these works, they achieve two important feats. Her sculptures will forever change the way we look at the connections between ornamentation and function, just as they remind us of how the most common objects have the potential to become treasures.

SUSAN HAMBURGER/CONRAD VOGEL: RECENT WORK

September 27-October 22, 2006

The Allen Priebe Gallery of The University of Wisconsin in Oshkosh

Co-curated with Yael Lipschutz

Susan Hamburger mines the traditionally female dominion of the home to unearth social and psychological dimensions of decorative objects. Her large and sensuously painted Truss canvases exhibit lavish, bound drapery that advertises seduction yet simmers with inner unease. The beauty and neuroticism of these tethered window treatments allude to the attraction of middle-class women to the endless project of beautifying their domestic surroundings. By contrast the Ongepatchket series depicts archetypes of interior design held up to the American woman as aesthetic models: ornate vases lie coquettishly aside lush velvet curtains in these nimbly painted canvases. That Ongepatchket is a Yiddish word meaning overly done or garish signals that these paintings are time capsules returning us to the home, and design aesthetic, of Hamburger’s immigrant grandmother. Though the modernist viewer may read these flamboyantly decorative paintings as a cultural critique, or even mocking appraisal, of such furniture, the artist’s investment of her customary care in the work’s execution conveys the other side of her intent: a sense of the furniture’s original intimacy and personal meaning. The relationship between decorative objects and socio-economic groups is also at play in the “cut-out” series, in which eighteenth-century porcelain dining sets serve as inspiration for Hamburger’s ersatz dishes. The originals were produced in factories for the British middle-class. Affordable, the plates became ubiquitous household items in the mid-1700s and only hundreds of years later evolved into the high-class collector’s items they are associated with today. Hamburger cunningly transforms and alters the meaning of this original cultural convention by a relatively slight shift in material and decorative emphasis. The faux porcelain plates, rendered in ink on foam board, come to us as simulacra, copies of a decorative tradition that was itself so removed from the original that Hamburger’s transformations register with more handmade vitality than their sources.

Conrad Vogel peoples his vibrant and deftly linear set-pieces with vanquishers and slaves, conquerors and bedraggled masses. His repertoire of gestural, figurative imagery is collected from historical periods, such as the American Civil War, and from his personal travels through the West Indies. Vogel references everything from contemporary cultural clichés and contradictions to the current war in Iraq. An awareness that two of Vogel’s primary inspirations are Candide and Uncle Tom’s Cabin helps one to recognize that his art is an unusually direct and principled cultural critique. But the theatrical nature of his work could not be clearer, as each rectangle is highlighted by a faux-baroque, high-arched frame, within which lurk his landscapes and heroes. Stylistically, the compositions draw upon traditions as diverse as the Japanese woodcut, the American comic book, and nineteenth-century peep-show theater sets. This last tradition, that of early optical entertainment and pre-cinema perspectival experiments, allows Vogel to breathe real life into his paintings, as he transforms thematic concerns into pop-up theatrical compositions. What results are highly beautiful, subtly sculptural reexaminations of the larger, original paintings. Though shrunk and compressed, the enigmatic three-dimensionality of these pieces allows the viewer to slip off the coils of culture and be overcome with actual wonder.

Text by Yael Lipschutz

THE RAW AND THE COOKED

September 21 – October 29, 2006

Hampden and Central Galleries, University of Massachusetts, Amherst

Victoria Calabro, Katherine Daniels, Marilla Palmer, Anna Pedersen Mark Power, Diana Puntar, Carol Salmanson, Gae Savannah

This exhibition explores the refinement of attitudes and ideas in the formation of a current sculptural aesthetic. It presents a physical argument on the merit of accepting the concept of sophistication as a qualification of artistic talent. How does the look of one art work versus another determine our ability to judge its value?

The title refers to a book by the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, which dictates how a certain degree of sophistication is necessary for wild men to raise themselves into a civilized situation, determined first by the use of language, especially in written forms, and second by whether or not food is cooked or consumed raw.

In art history, the language of sculptural expression has altered radically from its prominent usage as a means of expressing homage to heroes and civic leaders of bygone days, into a vernacular of specific statements on the value of appearance. It has relinquished its iconic status and become expressive, even dramatic.

Forms commonly mislead the viewer from reaching an immediate understanding of culturally tangent meaning. Works may be hard and heavy yet comprised of a substance that is usually regarded as fragile; they may follow the time-honored traditions of regional folk art but also ascribe to a mathematical cleanness and complexity; they may impose organic qualities that alternate discursively between the gestural and the visceral; they may resemble everyday objects yet ruthlessly impose a chaotic view of reality; they may use illumination to first motivate introspection but then dazzle and bemuse the viewer; and they may inspire deep meaning but do so through the use of materials that are transient, and intrinsically frivolous.

Both a specific choice of materials and effects, as well as the artist’s degree of intentionality in delivering a given aesthetic, have aided them in developing their individual statements. The Raw and The Cooked presents a cumulative perspective on the qualities which determine aesthetic accomplishment as a sui generis gestalt for the current era.

VICTORIA CALABRO

VICTORIA CALABRO

VICTORIA CALABRO

KATHERINE DANIELS

KATHERINE DANIELS



KATHERINE DANIELS



MARILLA PALMER



MARILLA PALMER



MARILLA PALMER



ANNA PEDERSEN



MARK POWER



MARK POWER



MARK POWER



MARK POWER



DIANA PUNTAR



GAE SAVANNAH



GAE SAVANNAH



GAE SAVANNAH



GAE SAVANNAH




GAE SAVANNAH

REBECCA HACKEMANN: “PEEK”

July 7-August 6, 2006

DABORA GALLERY
1080 Manahttan Avenue, between Dupont
and Eagle Streets, Brooklyn NY, 718. 609.9629

Lynda Mahan: lynda@daboragallery.com
URL: http://www.daboragallery.com

Article Projects and Dabora Gallery are proud to exhibit “Peek” by Rebecca Hackemann, a storefront installation of the artist’s stereoscopes, which make certain participatory demands upon the viewer, to gaze into the twin eyeholes to see the art—and when facing the images contained inside, one is also called upon to read the messages that accompany them, putting together the separate elements of a complicated esthetic event that is both imagistic and linguistic at the same time. Each of the collages in her stereoscopes is part quandary and part parable.

Rebecca Hackemann is a contemporary artist whose pieces stretch the definition of fine art black and white photography as language and formally as flat image on the wall. Photography and sculpture are combined into “photo based” work or optical sculptures that humorously address contemporary political and societal issues as well as language and how it's meaning is constructed. The work most often consists of an installation of handwritten text on the walls as we well as hung white boxes, which the viewer peers into through 2 lensed peepholes. Inside these optical sculptures are stereoscopic black and white constructed photographs (silver gelatin prints)of a fictional world with text. By looking through the lenses the viewer sees the images in 3-D–thus the sculpture acts as both a stereo viewer and a conceptual container with its own inscriptions.

HOME BASE

126 Greenpoint Avenue, Brooklyn, New York, March 1-30, 2006.

Part of collaborative curatorial project originated by Anat Litwin focusing on themes of nostgalia, domesticity, and origin. Article Projects organized Room #1 with Diane Apostolacus, Marcy Brafman, Robert Grant, and Mark Power.

Rooms 2-6, curated by Anat Litwin, with work by Peter Dudek, Merav Ezer, Anat Litwin, Raffael Lomas, Arik Miranda, Shiri Sandler, Emily Silver, Monika Sosnowski, Joshua Strauss, and Shirley Wegner

I would like to ask this question: what is home? Home is everything that’s familiar to us, the many little things that arrange themselves in the order of our daily experience, which define the state of domestic bliss, that color our first encounters with life in the family abode, and which we remember just as much as the more dramatic events that shape our emotional growth, even though we are apt to take them for granted.

Such encounters are more often than not extremely commonplace, but they reflect the texture of empirical knowledge: that household objects have a given resonance beyond their mere use; that brand names are ornamentations on the unconscious; that places like a bathtub basin or a shiny kitchen countertop are arenas waiting for dramas to unfold; and that the personas of parents are imprinted in the clothes they wore.

All of these experiences lead us to a place that is alternately warm and inviting while also mysterious and foreboding. The same home that we remember to a degree matching nostalgia can also be filled with somberness and menace, the same objects and images can also remind us of the horror a child feels when things are not as they should be; and what we feel as adults when we are forced to put away childish things.

The home becomes a shell of its former memory. We replace old memories with new ones, old dishes and brand names with new ones, and the past fades away like an old photograph.

Here we have art about the home, and though it is new we are older and wiser for seeing in it a semblance of our past lives. We still make use of the same items today, and random memories return to us when we see an older woman in the street, the picture of a lost relative, or we see someone eating a candy bar with a wrapper of a certain color, and we remember what it meant as a child, to feel alive.

Home is a past filled with memories that can only grow into a better future.

BEAUTY’S BURDEN: THE NEW ROMANTICISM

Tuesday, May 9, 7:00 PM, $10 admission

Makor-Steinhardt Center at 35 West 67th Street near Lincoln Square

The final event in a year-long series of artist lectures brings a panel discussion with sculptors Katherine Daniels, Marilla Palmer and Gae Savannah, and painter Margaret Lanzetta.

All of these artists produce bodies of work that manifest elements of decoration, including ornate beading, flashing lights and crystals, ethnic fabrics and hair accessories, and textile design such as appears on wallpaper or book margins.

How does this renewed interest in visual motifs previously denigraded as merely female represent a progressive view of how marginalized media can be made to reenter and renew the contexts for contemporary art production, its fetishization, and its critical context?

What is really at stake in such work is the dignity of culturally empowered expression, its escape from the margins of creativity that achieves its ends both aesthetically and politically. Join us to see what comes of viewing the art and discussing its origin and its future.

KATHERINE DANIELS