“…I’m beginning a new book to have a companion, someone with whom I can talk, eat, sleep, at whose side I can dream and have nightmares, the only friend whose company I can bear at the moment.” —Hervé Guibert
 
To The Friends Who Saved My Life,
…an exhibition prompted by the introduction of Francesca Woodman’s work to Heinz Peter-Knes and Danh Vō. They in turn suggested a parallel to Hervé Guibert, unknown to us at the time. About a year later, we learned that Nightboat Books, the companion enterprise to Callicoon Fine Arts, was newly engaged with Guibert translations, a publication plan that in turn prompted the gallery to introduce Guibert’s photographs to an American audience. Shared images and writings closed a circle that we hadn’t known of before, including our own works, those of Rona Yefman, an Israeli photographer living in New York, Heinz, Danh, and a single Francesca Woodman, as our starting point.
 
Guibert’s best known book, To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life, is a memoir of crisis and roller-coaster years of rushing between doctors and lovers. With extraordinary recall and dispassion, that is, with a photographic voice, even towards his own diagnosis and decline, Guibert maps the early years of the AIDS crisis. In those times when human friends became “friend[s] whose company I can bear at the moment,” perhaps it was photography that eased them through the door.
 
Among the many formal similarities between Woodman and Guibert, it should be noted that both spent time living and photographing in Rome, where Heinz and Danh were recently in residence, and that the images Woodman and Guibert made there are steeped in its light and shadows. Rona Yefman did not know of Guibert, but she was known to us through her extended photo essay on her brother, and through a pair of striking one-minute films. Moyra’s bottles, Jason’s Polaroids and Rona’s sibling study, all keep the images close to home. Danh and Guibert absorb the Villa Medici residence through its physical effects upon its residents, past and present: the erotics of place carry by association, the knowledge of who was there before. So too does Heinz’s discovery of his own face plastered on the red-lit bathroom wall of a bar, and in his portfolio of black and white prints. Seemingly following an order that appeared in the unedited rolls of 35mm film, flared end frames included, Heinz’s box of prints return us back to the place of the photographer sorting the moments of seeing.
—Jason and Moyra
 
To The Friends Who Saved My Life: Moyra Davey, Hervé Guibert, Heinz Peter-Knes, Jason
Simon, Danh Vō, Francesca Woodman, Rona Yefman
 
Exhibition dates: May 19 - June 21, 2013.
Opening reception: Sunday, May 19th, 6 to 8pm
 
CONTACT: Photi Giovanis, info@callicoonfinearts.com, 212 219 0326

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
 
Maria E. Piñeres
PLAYLAND
May 17 – July 7, 2013
 
Opening Reception: Thursday, May 16, 6-8pm
 
DCKT Contemporary is pleased to present PLAYLAND, MARIA E. PIÑERES’s fourth solo exhibition with the gallery. PIÑERES’s signature medium of stitched needlepoint places the nude figure in an optical duel with the eye-catching graphics of the pinball machine playfields and backglasses of her adolescence.
 
PLAYLAND, a now defunct 1980s’ Times Square gaming arcade, stood as a shiny, visually stimulating beacon to youth, nestled in perverse contrast with the then ubiquitous porn palaces, peep shows and sex shops. PIÑERES’s works set youthful rent boys and pin-up girls into the contextual backdrop of pinball, where their sexuality can be seen in a playful and sentimental light void of shame and smut. Preserving the common pinball themes of luck and chance, the Latin phrases that appear as machine names lend airs of levity and existentialism, alluding more to the real game of life than one of fantasy.
 
Hic et Nunc (Here and Now), Ex Malo Bonum (Good out of Evil) and Caveat (Beware) are among PIÑERES’s largest works to date and their heroic nude figures enliven more narrative landscape scenes. Varied stitching patterns and angles create a mixture of textures and added shading, allowing for the expansion of the image graphics while referencing historic Bargello needlework. The Latin phrases recontextualize the imagery and mask the actual pinball game names, which are often double entendres.
 
PIÑERES lives and works in Los Angeles. Other solo exhibitions include Walter Maciel Gallery (Los Angeles). Group exhibitions include Stitched at the Armory Center for the Arts (Pasadena, CA), Pricked: Extreme Embroidery at the Museum of Arts & Design (New York) and Celebrity at the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art (Scottsdale, AZ). She has been included in publications such as The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Time Out New York, The New Yorker, Time, The Village Voice and V.
 
The exhibition will be on view at DCKT Contemporary, 21 Orchard Street (between Canal & Hester).
Hours are Wednesday through Sunday, noon -6pm.
For further information, please contact Dennis Christie or Ken Tyburski at the gallery.

James J. Williams III
Leave a stain
30 MAY— 6 JULY 2013. WED – SUN. 12 - 6
OPENING 30 MAY 6-8PM
 
envoy enterprises is pleased to present our third solo exhibition of new work by James J. Williams III, Leave a stain. Each element of the show represents a farewell letter. Together they form a set acting as and waiting for the curtain call.
With each work Williams expresses how ritual and objects can be a method of release, even as the person, the place, the self has already said goodbye.
The installation is a series of pleas for acknowledgement as they hover over farewells. Some somber, some bitter, some vicious and vacant. As the viewer moves through the set each piece is a skin shed, a bridge burned. Leave a stain is one last plea for regard and becomes the voice calling back, “Let go.”
 
James J. Williams III is a Brooklyn native, is an artist, curator and creative director. He has had solo exhibitions in New York, Miami, London, Paris, and Washington DC. Since 2003 James has served as the director and founder of the Thorstein Foundation. His work has been reviewed in Opium Magazine, Art Cal, NY Art Beat, Lapiz, Double Magazine and The New York Times.

Signing, sealing, swallowing, flogging, revealing, casting, unsealing, regurgitating, healing, releasing. Reflection, nested in opposites, is betrayal—this has to be the axiom that marks our starting point, even if we have always already started, always already find ourselves halfway down the road to perdition. Perdition is grace. We have cast our inconsolable eyes on the heavens. We’ve call this Genesis as a way to absolve ourselves. To look up then, this is what eyes are for—eyes in the universal absence of consolation. And this is why the wise, as the Assyrians remind us in their sand-blasted books, sometimes gouged them out with sharpened flint and fed them to the hogs. To see in blindness the blindness of seeing. The binary falters and fails. It fails us. It fails at the moment that the demons are cast out. Masterfully cast out. Dark castings. To cast is to release, to pull from a mold, to make a figure by filling negative space. The opposite of—not the reflection of. From the cast of the godly, then, something ungodly. Legion is not the name(s) of the problem. Only its prompting, the road—a road that bifurcates from the one that leads to graceful perdition—to unsealing the location of the always open but hidden Secret Text, spread out like the firmament itself, that is, the very theological substrate, that reveals that the One is not reflected in the Other, that Good is not the counterpart of Evil. Sealing and unsealing, swallowing and regurgitating, flogging and healing, casting and releasing. Evil and Evil are Two—both released from the same godly mold, but neither, as the shape of its negative hollow, congruent with it. This, then, will be about bearing witness, but not from a margin, not even the margin of seeing. The witnessing of the released. So it will be about failure instead, insofar as “being about” can still sustain itself at the cliff’s edge of incomprehension. Bearing witness in the unwitnessing opened up by the plunge of the witness into the void. The witnessing of the dead witness, the witness without perception. This will be about witnessing and about theology as bearing witness: attestation, testimony, testament. The voiceless testament. The binary falters and fails. The leaping over the side of the cliff can “bear witness” to a theology. It can promise it, it can be a response to it, as to a testamentary promise. Indeed it must, it cannot not, do so. But it is an unworded promise. It’s very unwording is the promise. It can so not do so. And in doing so, it reinforces the very commitment that safeguards it as a testamentary promise. But not with the idea of applying a previously existing form of theology, or of referring to one as to a charter written somewhere else, or of obeying its laws like a transcendent authority, but rather by itself promising, in the act of its event, which is also the act of its debasement insofar as suicide is the graceful disgracing, the foundation of a theology. Of an a-theology. An other theology. A theology of filth. A theology with no believer. Always witnesses, always multiple. But not a theology of the pack, either. Not wolves, not rats. Despicable shit-eaters, never gorging the fecal pies in unison. A theology, an a-theology, of grovelers, of mud-inhabitants. A theology that is no cast, no model, no laws, just pure release. It would be a matter, then, of the suicided witness constituting, through its decision, collective always but never of a collectivity as such, its own theology, a-theology, an un-atheist a-theology that must also, through its generality, become, invent, institute, offer for reading, in an exemplary way, signing it, at the same time sealing it and unsealing it, the possibility of this a-theology, of this bearing witness through death. In the singular. In this instance only. For it can only happen once—this unveiling of the good Evil, of what the good or the godly releases without this release being like itself. Inscribed with the hoof of the suicided in protest, in an effort to illustrate. But this is the space of the un-illustrational. The binary fails here again. The a-theology comes, emerges, consolidates, in the event itself, in the double-event of the suicide and the witnessing of the suicide, false of mirror or no mirror but a witness of the double-event of the Christ’s casting out and casting in the demonic. It is the mastery of casting in, of possessing the living with the demonic, guiding this event. This double-event is its singularity (suicide as witnessing), even as it imperfectly doubles, while un-doubling it, another singularity (Christ jamming the demonic in the bodies of the innocent). It’s its repeatable—insofar as it is theology—unrepeatability. At a particular date, on the day that the Christ cast the demons across the species-boundary, in an absolute violation, a violation of not any law in particular, by a violation as itself, as such, as Event, abominable enough to instill mortal fear in the villagers, at the both unique and repeatable—that is, unrepeatable repeatable—date of a signature, of a signed abominable act of exorcism and possession, the negation of itself already nested in the act, canceling it out, making it the historical negative act par excellence, the Evil Event, something—or rather a nothing—that could be answered, that could be attested to, that could be witnessed, and, at the same time, flogging the binary one more time, witnessed only by an act of negation equally radical, radically enough to establish a counter-theology, an outside to theology—the leaping of the hogs over the side of the cliff. The immaculate assumption of the impossible task.The generation of a reminder, a trace that vanishes with the life of the suicide, outside of the Two—of the evil of the demonic and of the evil of the Christ. The jump, in other words, is the inscription of evil in the world, not the evil of the leapers, the porcine evil, but the very evil that is at the heart of the figure of the Christ, the evil that marks the release—the figure—constituted in the hollow of the godly cast. The swine are the lambs that unmask the Lamb as Goat, that establish the undeniability of the Two. The leap carries reference beyond itself, beyond reference, to where evil establishes a different kind of world, clocked in the veils of theology, of ungodly Son birthed by the God-Father, the Cast of Perfection, establishing the universal absence of consolation. The swine is inedible because it belongs to a world we can’t measure up to.

The Hole is proud to present a sister exhibition to our current survey of figurative painting, XSTRACTION, that surveys new approaches to abstraction. Expanding upon the themes introduced in the two exhibitions at Deitch Projects “Substraction” curated by Nicola Vassell and “Constraction” curated by Kathy Grayson, this show will present all the various strategies young and established artists are using to make abstract painting exciting and urgent. The exhibition will be accompanied by an “encyclopedic” book of the same title available June 1.

The Hole is proud to present the second solo exhibition by Holton Rower at the gallery where we will present a selection of new pour paintings and debut a new body of work, “focus paintings."

Sheryo and YOK created a body of work that portays the modern world using an ancient technique – painting on porcelain vases. They combined eastern & western elements to portray the values of ideology, devotion, relationships, dharma and karma, depicting a narrative from the rich tales of their journey in SEAsia. They re-interpret the traditional folklore and fables of old Chinese times by injecting their own personal stories with their iconic styles. They use a variety of media to bring these stories to life including the treasured fine art of porcelain vase making. Working in the very factories that have produced these exquisite vases for centuries they paint their warped characters and modern stories using the same age old techniques that produce a bold and unique body of work.

Launch F18 is delighted to present 1XX, a group exhibition curated by Sam Trioli. The exhibition opens Saturday, June 1st from 6:00 - 8:00 PM and will remain on view until Saturday, July 27, 2013.
 
In the May 2011 issue of Frieze magazine, Ronald Jones wrote an article titled Whatever Works, a discussion on design methods and the integration of systems thinking in the 1950s. In the article Ronald quotes Jack Burnham from a 1968 issue of Art Forum, in which he writes: “In the past our technologically conceived artifacts structured living patterns. We are now in transition from an object-oriented to a systems-oriented culture. Here change emanates, not from things, but from the way things are done.”
 
1XX discusses this very concept within the parameters of the artist book and the forum in which this medium has been used on the contemporary art stage. Collectively, the work within the exhibition addresses the diversity of design and social structure that has reshaped the cultural standard of the medium, allowing for it to become more than only a product of simply purpose. As a result, many believe that the medium will slowly vanish as technology advances and the idea that printed matter could become obsolete to functional form. However, is this very idea merely a shift in design, as Burnham discusses, rather than being a truly undesirable product?
 
Within 1XX this thought is explored as it traces through a range of styles, printings, functions and techniques. Each of the works examines the function and identity of the art publication by delving further into its text, at a page, its binding and the cover. The books are experienced, not just through sight, but with the rare pleasure of tactile stimulation that is often missing from fine art exhibitions. At their roots, these works are relatives to a medium that traces back to the 27th and 26thcentury BC, which through its history has been continuously redefined and re-designed.
 
Participating artists and works by or on them include: Joshua Abelow, Ross Bleckner, Joy Drury Cox, f.ART magazine, Dianna Frid, Gypse Eyes, Johanna Heldebro, Sean Lamoureux, McDermott & McGough, Isca Greenfield-Sanders, Adam Stennett and Peter Young. A selection of books will be traveling to the Sharon Art Center in September for the exhibition con(TEXT) which is being curated by Tim Donovan.
 
Sam Trioli is a artist, curator and musician based in New York City.

LMAKprojects is pleased to announce Claudia Joskowicz’s solo exhibit Intersections. The exhibit consists of a large video installation and photographs of her project Every Building on Avenida Alfonso Ugarte - After Ruscha. The work is an exploration of the urban landscape of the city of El Alto in her home country of Bolivia through a look at the intersections between everyday life and historical events that resonate in the collective memory of that city and, the country at large.
 
The photographic series and two-channel video installation Every Building on Avenida Alfonso Ugarte - After Ruscha takes as its inspiration Edward Ruscha’s photo book Every Building on the Sunset Strip (1966). A selection of photographs from the series ponders the juxtaposition of the continuum of time and a still reenactment of an affecting moment in Bolivian history.
 
The video is installed in the back section of the gallery with two projections on opposite walls, with a true to life ration. As the viewer stands in between the two projections, one is taken along a continuous tracking shot on the major thoroughfare in El Alto. The video takes inventory of a quotidian Bolivian scene reflecting a contemporary developing city. El Alto is one of the largest urban centers and one of the fastest growing cities in Bolivia as well as one of the sites where violent protests related to the Bolivian gas conflict in October 2003 took place. In a continuous take, the mundane is juxtaposed with ritual and social conflict inserting one single still scene of violence into the register of the typical scenery of daily Bolivian life thus capturing the variegated reality of El Alto, and, by extension, also that of all developing countries.

John Opera, a priori
Opening Reception: May 30th, 2013, 6–8pm
Exhibition Dates: May 30th-July 3rd, 2013
 
Longhouse Projects is very pleased to present a priori, by John Opera. This is his first solo exhibition with the gallery.
 
John Opera’s recent introduction of the cyanotype into his repertoire of photographic approaches symbolically reflects his gradual evolution from empirical research to a more clinical, methodical study. His trajectory began with carefully honed and cropped landscape photographs, moving to abstract anthotypes—a photosensitive process of bleaching out images created from a fruit or vegetable based emulsion. His latest body of work centers around a focused meditation on seemingly everyday objects translated in a very specific Prussian Blue on a residue-washed linen surface. The process of the cyanotype is a now almost obsolete technique that is not too far removed from the anthotype, using liquid chemicals and ultraviolet rays to develop the images. It was originally conceived to reproduce notes and diagrams, and later blueprints. Opera’s photographic paintings curiously address this explicit objective by making notes out of rock collections and label-free bottles and diagrams out of ropes, chains, and posed hands.
 
There is a linearity that is often avoided within today’s art trends, given the progressive shift toward interdisciplinary activities and confluence of media, but part of the power in Opera’s work comes from his voracious consumption of his own personal previous bodies of works and the accumulated integration directed back into new projects. a priori literally means “from the earlier” and Opera willfully chooses to pull from the earlier and push forward. His landscape photography came from his interest in better understanding the world around him, the anthotypes came from an interest in scrutinizing and creating directly from the same locations (the fruits and vegetables used to create the photographic emulsions are sourced from the same places), and the cyanotypes come from an interest to further understand his own investigation into the history and process of photography. From one project to the next, one can trace the complicated contrapositions inherent in each of the works—particularly the heightening of contrasts between formal techniques and conceptual concerns specifically tied to photography and painting, as his work has always been mutually comprised of these two mediums. The cyanotype represents for the artist a refreshing return to an earlier mode in order to look at things anew.
 
John Opera (American, b. 1975) lives and works in Chicago. He received his MFA from the Art Institute of Chicago in 2005. He is currently represented by Andrew Rafacz Gallery in Chicago, where he has had four solo exhibitions. Other recent exhibitions include a two-person show with Matt Sheridan-Smith at the Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis, MO and group shows at Carter and Citizen and Country Club in Los Angeles, Monya Rowe in New York, and the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago.
 
For further information, please contact Keith J. Varadi at keith@longhouseprojects.com

Hot House
Opening Reception: May 30th, 2013, 6–8pm
Exhibition Dates: May 30th-July 3rd, 2013
 
Longhouse Projects is very pleased to present Hot House, a group exhibition comprised of Tisch Abelow, Seth Alverson, Ivin Ballen, and Ariel Dill.
 
“Hot House” is a bebop standard made famous by Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker in the early 1950s. The 50s are an era that many Americans have placed in a saccharine time capsule, where World Wars were in the past and a prosperous suburban life was seen to be in the near future, creating a new ideology based around conformity. The Civil Rights and Counter Culture movements that spawned in opposition made for hot houses, indeed. This was the beginning of a shift in Modernism.
 
At this point, the art world has its own specific nostalgic history and this has seemed to forever include a healthy skepticism of moralism, ever since Greenberg’s skewed idealistic notions of conformity. Though, this skepticism has recently transformed into a somewhat aloof translation of irony. Within this evolution, many artists have stepped out and stirred a soft rebellion toward expectations. This often has resulted in works that have become described as ‘modest,’ ‘humble,’ ‘abject’, ‘non-objective,’ or ‘provisional.’
 
The four artists presented here have sidestepped and/or shuffled these expectations. Their paintings are seductive and deceiving, but they do not ask, “What is enough?” Instead, they ask, “What is this?” In doing so, they firm up this recent ‘soft rebellion’ and resuscitate suspicion and criticality. However, the real complication derives from their complicated comfort in superficiality—each of these painters, simultaneously revel in vicissitude and beauty, offering both a single and a flipside.
 
Tisch Abelow lives and works in New York, NY. She received a BA from Sarah Lawrence College in 2007. Recent exhibitions include group shows at Shoot The Lobster (New York, NY) and Minus Space (Brooklyn, NY).
 
Seth Alverson lives and works in Houston, TX. He received his MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2010. He has had three solo exhibitions at Art Palace in Houston, as well as group exhibitions at major Texas institutions.
 
Ivin Ballen lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. He received his MFA from the Cranbrook Academy of Art in 2006. He has had solo shows at Winkleman Gallery (New York, NY) and Susanne Hilberry Gallery (Detroit, MI) and has exhibited widely in the United States and Europe.
 
Ariel Dill lives and works in Queens, NY. She received an MFA from Hunter College in 2006. Recent exhibitions include a solo show at Southfirst (Brooklyn, NY), and group shows at Halsey McKay (East Hampton, NY) and 247365 (Brooklyn, NY).
 
For further information, please contact Keith J. Varadi at keith@longhouseprojects.com

Aaron Williams tends to work with cheap, fallible materials like book pages and posters, interested in the populist, stock imagery that has very little physical value but maintains great cultural and emotional currency. While examining the differences between a hand-made mark and a photographic image ( particularly one that has the popular appeal of a music or film star ) they become abstracted images: “ideas of portrait” rather than an actual portrait.
In this sense a famous picture of the Alps exists as an idea of a landscape rather than a singular, personal record of an experience. This critical distance allows the artist to move more freely in manipulating the imagery and also opens up questions and unexpected visual directions in the studio.
Working at the intersection between image and material; the space between the emotive capacity of the image and the physical reality of the paper and printing process, Williams questions the validity and reality of the images he works with, particularly in light of them being so broadly disseminated.
 
Aaron Williams was born in Rhode Island and holds a BFA from the Maine College of Art and an MFA from Rutgers University. His work has been included in venues throughout the United States, including Bill Maynes, Max Protetch, Lu Magnus and Stephan Stoyanov galleries (NYC), Howard House (Seattle) and Rosenwald- Wolf Gallery (Philadelphia). He has had solo shows at Baumgartner and Max Protetch galleries in New York as well as at OH+T gallery in Boston. He has received reviews in the Boston Globe, the NY Times, the Seattle PI and L Magazine in addition to several online sources. Upcoming shows include the Portland Biennial at the Portland Museum (ME) and a solo show at LaMontagne Gallery in Boston in the fall. Aaron Williams lives and works in Queens, NY.

Mulherin + Pollard is very pleased to present , “a closing eyelid, a tiny fainting spell” a recent body of work by Brooklyn-based artist Saira McLaren, which explores issues of femininity, residue and saturation.
 
“Colour ...is a kind of bliss...like a closing eyelid, a tiny fainting spell,” Roland Barthes
 
Falling lapsing into overwhelming hallucinatory - colour - spreading flowing bleeding staining, soaking merging into both the dream and the nightmare.
 
The pinks, the reds, the feminine threaten to engulf you — slipping over the white lines, off the white walls.
 
In paintings, fabric dyes on raw linen and small ceramic works, these ideas associated with chromophobia, the feminine and of generally what is good taste versus the garish, the clashing, and the `made-up` are explored.

Munch Gallery is pleased to announce two solo exhibitions.
 
‘I Believe in Death after Life’ by Morten Hemmingsen (DK)
‘Summer Home Collection’ by Jeffrey Owen Ralston (US)
 
Both artists will be present at the Opening Reception Saturday, June 1 from 7-9 pm.
 
MORTEN HEMMINGSEN – I BELIEVE IN DEATH AFTER LIFE
Hemmingsen’s approach is not without humor, when he takes on the substantial topics of life and death. It’s not the loud slapstick humor, but a quiet subtle one that might make you chuckle, but there is often more at stake, an underlying thoughtfulness and sincerity. The exhibition contemplates our final destination, and invites the viewer to engage and reflect, but the artist himself has a significant view on life, and the aftermath in particular, which is expressed across multiple media.
 
With puns and play, Hemmingsen creates his iconic blue/white banners. Carved in wood but ceramic in appearance, they draw references to the tattoo and Danish/Dutch porcelain traditions. It’s an illusion of fragility paired with quirky lines and images. The banner with the exhibition title ‘I Believe in Death after Life’ emphasizes that life should be lived here and now - there is no “on the other side”. This is the artist’s conviction, and it is not the only work of art where Hemmingsen battles religious beliefs. Similar sentiment can be seen in the monochrome inverted black cross, with the carved text ‘Good God’. A work that attracts the viewer with its immediate exquisiteness, but behind the superficial glossiness the message appears cynical and questions the construction of our lives, and the faith in redemption. Death on the other hand becomes very tangible in the series ‘Victim’ where the remains of dead animals are explored – a dissected frog, a dismembered horse, an canidae autopsy.
 
Besides wood cuts carved with one-liners or illustrated with every day objects, the exhibition will also present some of his other work; paintings made on the back of vintage school posters along with selected gouache work. This is Hemmingsen’s second exhibition at Munch Gallery.
 
————————-
 
JEFFREY OWEN RALSTON – SUMMER HOME COLLECTION
It’s a typical morning. I am sipping tea, flipping through a CB2 catalogue, and listening to HGTV’s ‘Design on a Dime.’ I’m dressed and ready for a day trip to Ikea. I’m not looking for anything in particular, but just feel like browsing. My cart fills fast with random and perfectly matching objects. They all make so much sense to me. I’m back home and anxiously unwrap the packaging. I’m disappointed. Nothing seems to be how I imagined; nothing matches anymore. Everything is too small to fit anything into, and everything looks really cheap. I get a spoon for my ice cream and click the remote. There is a commercial on the television for Cindy Crawford’s Home Collection. I feel like Cindy is looking directly at me as we both lay on the sofa. I notice how flawless her collection is, how perfectly relaxed she is, and then I ask myself, “Why does she have a home collection?” I want my own home collection.
 
I created a Summer home collection that demonstrates the harmony of a curated store display. The items have a close relationship to one another, undisturbed and in unison. However, this is easily interrupted when an object leaves the group. A person once told me “The painting is only yours until somebody else sees it.” The same goes for this show, only re-phrased, “The home collection is mine, until somebody takes something from it.”
 
‘Summer Home Collection’ is made with household trash bags and disposable plastic tablecloths, a medium that is usually used in my work. Although I have always been attracted to it’s aesthetic qualities, I feel that I should recognize that the plastic used for this installation has a much deeper voice than times before. Its semi-gloss appearance along with it’s cheaply produced and disposable history resembles the manufactured merchandise found at many retailers. Beautiful in the context of a gallery or showroom, the plastic becomes nearly trash when taken home.

Katherine Wolkoff: Deer Beds
A solo show, Color Photographs
May 8-June 30, 2013
 
The exhibition will open on Wednesday, May 8th with a reception from 6 to 8 p.m.
Sasha Wolf Gallery is proud to present, Katherine Wolkoff: Deer Beds.
This is Wolkoff’s second solo show with the gallery.
 
Katherine Wolkoff’s show Deer Beds consists of seven pictures made on Block Island, located off the Rhode Island coast. The pictures are of the imprints made in the grass by sleeping deer. Wolkoff found these deer beds by following the paths of the deer to the nests where they spent the night. Each time she came upon a bed she felt as if the deer had just departed, leaving its warm impression on the earth. She was always aware of their proximity. The photographs are at once a physical reminder of a living breathing animal and an abstract rendering of a field of grass. In this work, Wolkoff continues her decade-long investigation of the flora and fauna of this small, unique island, where she also photographed the collection of birds for her previous show, Found.
 
This is Katherine Wolkoff’s second exhibition at the Sasha Wolf Gallery. Her photographs have been widely exhibited, including exhibitions at Danziger Projects, the New York Photo Festival and Women in Photography. Her photographs are included in the collections of the Addison Gallery of Art and the Norton Museum of Art and the Yale Library. Born in 1976, Wolkoff graduated from Barnard College and received her MFA in photography from Yale School of Art.

 
JONATHAN VANDYKE
The Painter of the Hole
 
Opening: Sunday, May 5, 5 - 8pm
Exhibition dates: May 5 - June 23, 2013
 
Scaramouche is pleased to present The Painter of the Hole, Jonathan VanDyke‘s second solo exhibition with the gallery. VanDyke’s new work evolves from his wall-mounted and free-standing sculptures, first exhibited at Scaramouche in 2009, that “perform” as they continuously drip paint directly onto the floor, and from his many recent live performances, in which actors and dancers move silently for hours while paint drips upon them and passes from body to body. The works offer signifiers we associate with painterly process - canvas, stained and marked with color, appears in objects and is represented in photographs - yet VanDyke has pushed and pulled painting in such a way that these signifiers are displaced. Undoing media-specific boundaries, VanDyke re-orients modernist conventions, conflating painting with fiber arts, fashion, dance, textile design, and photography. With multiple collaborators and processes involved, the work subverts notions of painting‘s singularity and challenges the idea of individual authorship.
 
The title of the exhibit is borrowed from a series made by George Grosz in the late 1940s. Grosz portrayed a figure who, searching for a new vocabulary of making, found himself endlessly painting an image of a hole. Into this void VanDyke proposes, “painting not as a form so much as a restless mood, a conduit, a matrix that includes the making, presenting, perceiving, desiring, acquiring and physical decaying of paintings...I want to perform The Painter and perform painting, this stubborn manner of coloring that doggedly mirrors, marks, and circles us.”
 
A series of large-scale, sewn canvas works in the exhibit evolved from a long-term collaboration with the dancers Bradley Teal Ellis and David Rafael Botana, who are also a couple. In a durational, live performance entitled Cordoned Area, the two improvise from VanDyke’s score, wrestling, dancing, and negotiating each other‘s bodies while liquid paint drips and seeps from their costumes: they start clean and conclude covered in sweat and color. In the midst of spectators, Ellis and Botana publicly navigate that space between a performed and an actual relationship. Following Cordoned Area, VanDyke invited the two back to the studio to work with him away from public view. There Ellis and Botana, with paint inserted in their clothing, interpret VanDyke’s directions, dancing and making contact atop raw canvas. The paint serves as an unconscious trace, a trail of their interaction. This studio process results in a group of massive, marked canvases. VanDyke uses the canvases as raw material, cutting them into pieces and intermixing them to form opulent geometric patterns, and then sewing them back together. The patterns themselves reference 19th-century Amish quilts, Sonia Delauney fabric designs, the pants of Picasso‘s harlequins, the brickwork of a modern Danish housing block - patterns found next to and near the body.
 
Each painting is displayed on a partition placed in the midst of the space. The backs of the paintings, with their web of seams, are revealed, while the walls of the gallery remain empty. Hanging behind each painting is a photograph. For the creation of this series, Ellis and Botana’s canvases (in their uncut stage) were used as backdrop and floor in elaborate studio sets. Models (friends and performers from other works) strike poses that exist somewhere between private ritual and fashion shoot. This image of the still body in front of the marked canvas recalls VanDyke‘s own 2011 solo performance The Long Glance, in which he stood and stared at a major Jackson Pollock work for 40 hours, making himself immobile in front of an “action” painting. The photographs also reference the work of artists who used the camera to explore private realms aside of their primary practice, such as the 1920’s self-portraits of Gertrud Arndt ­- an important fiber artist at the Bauhaus - and the charged tableau of George Platt Lynes, who made elaborately staged photos of performers, his lovers and friends. The heavily made-up models in VanDyke‘s series wear Mondrian necklaces and Jackson Pollock jeans amidst ab ex curtains and geometric partitions. We are reminded that, despite the value and language we add to it, despite the relentless preservation of its surfaces, painting exists, too, as swaths of fabric: like an outfit or piece of clothing, it moves out into the world, embedded with its own histories, posing and projecting meaning, always becoming something else.
 
Jonathan VanDyke is a visual artist based in New York City. Recent solo projects include The Long Glance at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo; With One Hand Between Us, a project for Performa11 in New York; and Obstructed View, a performance and installation commissioned by The Power Plant in Toronto for the exhibition Coming After. VanDyke received an MFA in Sculpture from Bard College in 2005, attended the Skowhegan School in 2008, and in 2007 attended the Atlantic Center for the Arts, where he was mentored by the artist Paul Pfeiffer. His work has been reviewed in ArtForum, Modern Painters, TimeOut New York, White Hot, Artslant, Art Papers, and The Philadelphia Inquirer. VanDyke’s work has been featured in exhibitions at Socrates Sculpture Park, and Islip Art Museum, both in New York; The Museum of Fine Arts, Tallahassee, Florida; Vox Populi, Philadelphia; Rutgers University, New Jersey; University of Wolverhampton, England; and Exile Gallery, Berlin, among others. He has received awards from the Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation and the Joan Mitchell Foundation, and has served as a Visiting Artist Fellow at the University of Chicago and Illinois State University. Upcoming VanDyke's work can be seen in No Name at On Stellar Rays, New York, and do it (outside), the newest iteration of the instruction-based exhibition curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist at Socrates Sculpture Park, Long Island City.
 
Image: Jonathan VanDyke, Painting No9 (detail), Performance canvases, stained linen shirting, and waxed cotton in S. Delauney cloak pattern, 47 x 66 in.
 
Special thanks to fiber artist Brenda Colling for her work sewing the paintings.