NYAB Event - Andrew Prayzner “Passage”

Andrew Prayzner “Passage”

TSA

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The exhibition title refers to Lacan’s concept of the passage a l’acte, as interpreted by Zizek, as “an impulsive moment into action which can’t be translated into speech or thought and carries with it an intolerable weight of frustration.”

The series of paintings presented in this exhibition sets forth the notion of painting as a system of communication, albeit a flawed one of layered codes that compete among each other in the picture plane. They invite the question, “Is a painting a solitary entity or does it now act as a screen – a medium that is part of a larger network of signifiers?”

The paintings in Passage begin with text and gestures that are collected from conversations, notes, choreography and subconscious physical movement such as tapping, shaking, flicking and are drawn with tape into the substrate of the painting. Then, images taken from random photographic sources are painted over the layer. The tape is removed and the images are “interrupted” or “cancelled” by text and gestures, building competing systems of signs that renders different interpretations of the painting. Documenting the process of making modes of representation and abstraction visible to the eye, and referring to the dictionary definition of the word, Passage is a passing of time, an opening through a space, a notation of a text, or in the Cubist sense, a technique to break up spatial relationships in painting.

Andrew Prayzner was born in Boston, MA and lives and works in Brooklyn and Queens, NY. He was a fellow at Yaddo in 2011 and 2012, and attended a residency at SIM in Reykjavik, Iceland in 2005. His work has been featured in exhibitions at Real Art Ways (Hartford, CT), Athens Institute for Contemporary Art (Athens, GA), The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum (Ridgefield, CT), the Arcadia University Art Gallery (Glenside, PA), The Art and Design Gallery at the University of Kansas (Lawrence, KS), and at Dvorak SEC Contemporary (Prague, Czech Republic). He is a graduate of the School of Design at the University of Pennsylvania (MFA) and the University of Hartford’s Hartford Art School (BFA).