"Tailgates and Substitutes" Exhibition
Thierry Goldberg
This event has ended.
Thierry-Goldberg Gallery presents "Tailgates & Substitutes".
The title of the exhibition, taken from the Bob Dylan song "You Ain't Goin' Nowhere," refers to a work-process in which artists translate images into multiple forms and utilize them as substitutes for memory or an experience. In a sense, the works in this exhibition are a translation of an ideal, a convention, of a lost encounter the artists attempt to recapture. Uses of the grid, geometry, found and ready-made objects, photography, and text are all employed in connecting parts that whet memory and spark allusion.
Øystein Aasan uses display as a means to show how space obscures and constructs meaning. Using wooden frames to present two dimensional pieces functions in a similar way to how he makes use of a grid to obscure text in his two-dimensional work. Here with "Untitled (PLASTIK)," 2011, three paintings, like fragments of thought, are hung on an architectural framework comprising an object of partial recall.
Charles Harlan's sculpture “Remesh,” 2011, simply presents the framework as the object of recall, recalling itself. Here, several metal grid panels are held upright in tension between black clamps. By vertically stacking ubiquitous construction material, Harlan gives the piece its presence and sense of depth. In this way, the material, ever so removed from how it is usually experienced, becomes a portrait of itself.
Dave McDermott's “The Third Man,” 2011, employs a tongue-in-cheek quality in portraiture. Here two zainy circles and a crescent smile hover over a mysterious sfumato background. A profile in silhouette to the right of the painting adds to the moodiness of the atmosphere. One can read this as two separate faces—a double portrait—or as one portrait, with the separate geometric features and profile adding up to one face.
With a similar humor, Joshua Abelow's self portraits refer to Constructivism's geometric abstraction reclaimed through his own palette and irony. Two circles separated by a dangling J over a triangular patterned ground compose a face. These shapes recombine letters from his name J A B into a mask—how he literally brands his own retro abstraction.
Anna Betbeze's one retro claim is through her use of shag carpet, though she escapes the clutches of '70s decor by imbuing it with watercolor and acid-dye color fields. Her painting treatment of unstretched wool shag brings this surface into the realm of the organic and perhaps even magic. The work suggests the presence of painting without using its accustomed terms.
Joyce Kim's work speaks to painting as well, or rather a remembrance of it, via text and suede. The gold canvas included in the piece is a reminder that each of the installation's components is a distillation of painting. These parts then create a sense of narrative and performance in their evocation of painting much in conversation with the legacy of Yves Klein.
As Kim reflects on painting through installation, Ellie Krakow reflects on sculpture via photography. Krakow's pairing blank flat forms against fragments of Greco-Roman figurative sculpture reads as substitutes for them. The fact that one may begin to imagine ancient sculpture over Krakow's contemporary silhouette forms, mediated by the flat surface of a photograph, further complicates her game of building narrative and creating context.
Erika Mahr's work suggests a narrative of form as well, but her's references minimal sculpture as she carefully cuts out shapes that vary subtly from sheets of uniform stacked paper. Her meticulous cutting results in equally meticulous void whose form only exists through the looking in thought. Her use of black paper cut-outs in shaping an interior empty space plays off the overriding idea of absence in the exhibition.
Ian Pedigo also addresses the dialectic between thought and form in his sculpture. Pedigo work’s shows how the physical aspects of an object are inscribed with the mental in a parallel effort of creating meaning. In a sense, his sculptures are models of thought, and his “The Point from Which All Distances are Measured,” 2010, suggests this in its balance between drawn shape and three dimensional presence. The Point in the title implies an origin, however it is left up to the viewer to decide whether that origin refers to thought, materiality, or some combination of the two.
Considering origins, Mary Simpson explores marks of gesture that encapsulate both mental and physical qualities. For Simpson whether it be in film, photography, painting, or installation, gesture is the point by which all encounter is measured. In her “Untitled,” 2011, a W mark, similar to the calligraphic moves of Brion Gyson, hovers over an image of a zebra. The mark is a dash against the surface of the print that, despite its obstruction of the subject, gives another kind of access to it.
Hannah Whitaker's photography doesn't employ painting, as Simpson's does, but implies it through close framing. Without additional context, associations to painting occur before anything else in her photograph Helter Skelter. White snow on rocky black soil suggests gestural scrapes and, if the mind wanders, to zebra hide. Taken individually Whitaker's photographs are all equally ambiguous moments that acquire their meaning in context with each other, part to parts.
As all the work in Tailgates and Substitutes, eteam's project Wend der tanz zu steif wird, muss der Regen als Eiswürfel ausgegraben werden (If the dancing gets too stiff, the rain needs to get dug out as ice-cubes) insights connections between abstract ideas and physical reality. eteam does so in regards to site with Wend der tanz. After having acquired 36,000 square-foot plot of land including eight tenants and abandoned lots, they ran into problems of access to water. In charge of the area, eteam considered building a well. The reality of the problem grew into a project that explores the search for water in a series of artworks, such as “Piece of Dirt,” 2011, a Carl Andre like floor piece, comprised of twenty brown wooden squares.
Media
Schedule
from November 13, 2011 to January 22, 2012
Opening Reception on 2011-11-13 from 17:00 to 19:00