Ken Solomon "Post Party"
Josee Bienvenu Gallery
This event has ended.
Josée Bienvenu gallery presents Post Party, Ken Solomon’s second one-person exhibition. Post Party explores the imagery and iconography of the U.S. postal system. Whether it is building a public mailbox from sent parcels, falsifying postage stamps, making a teepee-sized envelope, a giant rubber stamp of a blank stamp, or a video documenting the journey of a letter never sent, Ken Solomon erects monuments to a soon-to-be extinct mode of communication.
The works are a meshing of mathematics and whimsy. The process is intensive, pushing repetition to examine nuance. In some cases, as in Plastic Parts, Solomon draws the same image hundreds and hundreds of times. These replications of the United States Plastic Man stamp are drawn and painted on 21 separate envelopes that are subsequently mailed and disseminated to reconvene at the gallery as a whole after a sometimes long journey though the intricacies and idiosyncrasies of the US postal system. Precise control and uncertainty play together, allowing for third party mark making - the stamps, stickers or marker lines added by the post office - and the occurrence of works getting lost.
[Image: Ken Solomon "Decision '08, (detail)" gouache and mixed media, 17 x 9.5 in.]
Media
Schedule
from April 12, 2008 to May 17, 2008