Simon Preston Gallery is delighted to present On The Passage of a Few, an exhibition of works by Alexandre da Cunha, Terence Gower, Luis Molina-Pantin and Lisa Tan. The exhibition opens on 19 June and runs until 4th August, 2013.
Borrowing its title from Guy Debord‘s 1959 film, On the Passage of a Few Persons Through a Rather Brief Unity of Time, the exhibition explores the relationship between citizen and environment, while it simultaneously critiques and pays homage to decaying modernist ideologies. Each artist dismantles the structure of modernist systems by exploiting and transforming the materiality of cultural and architectural tropes in order to make way for new narratives.
Terence Gower’s installation The Red Wall (El Muro rojo) dominates the gallery space. An enormous red wall frames a black and white restaged photo of Armando Salas Portugal’s famous 1953 image of Casa Barragán. By reducing Luis Barragán‘s exuberant colours to grey tones, the work highlights Barragan’s aesthetical concerns with emotional experience and architecture. Known for playful appropriation of everyday objects such as plungers, mops, fans or bottles, Alexandre da Cunha uses critical wit to topple hierarchical modernist language. With Full Catastrophe (drum XIV), the simple gesture of liberating a rusted industrial cement mixer from its original function raises complex questions of trade and labor. Luis Molina-Pantin is an obsessive chronicler. Whether using photography, books, everyday objects or postcards, Luis creates inventories of our over-looked cultural landscapes. Non-fiction reviews, is an installation consisting of sixteen fictional vintage books, each cover depicting an airplane disaster. Objectifying the book through the lens of the archive, the series becomes a strategy of representing failed ideologies - the imagery of flight, a classic modern aspiration displayed as a dystopian failure. Lisa Tan incorporates personal and collective histories in order to explore her long-standing preoccupation with the indefinable. In this instance, Alter Nordfriedhof casually documents a cemetery in Munich on a spring day. Overgrown vines and flowers obscure the tombstones into abstract shapes. Through the use of repetition and the apparatus of archival structures, an elegant ontological study transforms into a poetic meditation on mortality.
 
Biographical Information:
Terence Gower (b. 1965, Canada) lives between New York, France and Mexico. He has exhibited widely including; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington DC; PS1 Contemporary Art Center, New York; ICA Boston; UCLA Hammer Museum, LA; Queens Museum, New York; Labor, Mexico City; Galeria HR, Mexico City; The Power Plant, Toronto; The National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; Artspeak Gallery, Vancouver; Galerie M+R Fricke, Berlin; Aun Gallery, Tehran, Iran.
 
Alexandre da Cunha (b. 1969, Brazil) lives and works in London, UK. He has exhibited extensively and had recent solo exhibitions at CRG Gallery, New York; Centro Cultural Sao Paolo, Brazil; Camden Arts Centre, London; Thomas Dane Gallery, London; Galeria Luisa Strina, Sao Paulo; Sommer & Kohl, Berlin; CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco; Witte de With, Rotterdam. He has also been included in Sao Paulo Biennial, 2012; the San Juan Triennial, San Juan, 2009, Prague Biennale 2, Prague, 2005; the 50th Venice Biennale, 2003 and the Liverpool Biennial, 2002 among others.
 
Luis Molina-Pantin (b.1969, Switzerland). Lives and works in Caracas, Venezuela. Recent solo presentations include; Faria-Fabregas Galeria, Caracas; Lisa Sette Gallery, Arizona; Valenzuela Klenner Galería, Bogotá; Arte Contemporáneo, Caracas; Fondazione Villa Bardini, Florence. His work has also been showcased at the 7th Gwangju Biennial, Korea; The Cisneros Foundation, Miami; The 4th MERCOSUR Biennial, Porto Alegre, Brazil; 25th Sao Paulo Biennial, Brazil. He is currently included in ICP Triennial, New York and a solo exhibition will open at Henrique Faria, New York on 20 June 2013.
 
Lisa Tan (1973, New York). Lives and works in New York and Stockholm. She has been included in solo and group exhibitions at institutions and galleries such as Artists Space, New York; Centro Galego de Arte Contemporáneo CGAC, Santiago de Compostela; Arthouse at the Jones Center, Texas; Galerie Nordenhake, Stockholm; Kadist Art Foundation, Paris; Galería Parra & Romero, Madrid; D’Amelio Terras, New York; LA><ART, Los Angeles; and FRAC Bourgogne (Dijon). She is co-curating an exhibition with Lisa Oppenheim for Art in General that will open this September.
 
For further information, please contact the gallery via email at office@simonprestongallery.com or call on +1 212 365 4495.