Kiel Johnson "Listen Here, Busker!"
Maxwell Davidson Gallery/Davidson Contemporary
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Davidson Contemporary presents Kiel Johnson’s one-man show, Listen Here, Busker! This is Johnson’s first show with Davidson Contemporary, and his second in New York. Listen Here, Busker! features Johnson’s signature cardboard and chip board sculptures. The show focuses on the artist’s interpretations – often literal, always humorous – of classic musical instruments.
Johnson’s sculptures use cardboard, chipboard and, now, UV-activated surfboard foam to create a rough-hewn, do-it-yourself aesthetic, but are completed with such care and are detailed with such skilled variety, that each work is singularly interpretive.
Typically, Johnson’s sculptures are exaggerated but instantly recognizable, drawing on pop culture, fading technology, and West Coast street art imagination. In Listen Here, Busker!, Johnson chose to depict musical instruments because of their unchanged, iconographic shapes, and the way that are individually created to accentuate a human being.
The busker – an artist plying his trade in public – intrigued Johnson. While he, himself, is not a musician, Johnson is a craftsman trying to earn a living through his handiwork. As such, there is some irony in the idea of a busker selling in the whitewashed walls of a gallery as opposed to the grey grit of the sidewalk or subway tunnel.
Balancing out the rustic refinement of the sculptures, Johnson’s drawings have a street-art feel. Sometimes they are sketches for or a record of a sculpture, or simply an accompaniment. A drawing of cluttered headphones references the show’s theme, but also pokes fun at the sculptures’ sonic impotence.
Media
Schedule
from September 23, 2010 to October 30, 2010
Opening Reception on 2010-10-23 from 18:00 to 20:00