NYAB Event - “Paint Hotel” Exhibition

“Paint Hotel” Exhibition

Joe Sheftel Gallery

This event has ended.

“[T]he poten­tial for paint­ing will emerge in the con­junc­tive decon­struc­tion of the three instances that mod­ernist paint­ing has dis­so­ci­ated (the imag­i­nary, the real, and the sym­bolic).“
Yve-Alain Bois, “Paint­ing: The Task of Mourn­ing”

“We live entirely, espe­cially if we are writ­ers, by the impo­si­tion of a nar­ra­tive line upon dis­parate images, by the ‘ideas’ with which we have learned to freeze the shift­ing phan­tas­mago­ria which is our actual expe­ri­ence.”
Joan Did­ion, The White Album

Objects are inevitably images. As we nuance our ter­mi­nol­ogy for read­ing imagery within art­work, gen­er­al­i­ties like abstract and real­is­tic begin to lose their mean­ings. The image, inserted, ref­er­enced or trans­posed, may no longer be eas­ily read, as lay­ers of mean­ings, con­texts and ref­er­ences hover over its sur­face and rest beneath its lay­ers. Paint­ings become loca­tions of tem­po­rary lodg­ing where dif­fer­ent forms of mean­ing live in longer or shorter stays – pay­ing indi­vid­ual or cor­po­rate rates, at the bar, in the suite, or in the unused work­out room in the base­ment.

Con­cepts that have been applied to the works at hand demand the­o­ries and philoso­phies that impose mean­ings onto artis­tic choices – choices that may be purely aes­thetic, ide­o­log­i­cal, or per­haps unknow­able. Rather than align­ing and jux­ta­pos­ing art­works by those the­o­ries, Paint Hotel seeks to desta­bi­lize fixed the­o­ret­i­cal and genealog­i­cal nar­ra­tives. The point is not to be anti-theory, but rather to allow for an imme­di­ate expe­ri­ence.

Per­haps it is time to accept the ver­dict that what we are look­ing at trig­gers human curios­ity with its desire for a story, a moral and a res­o­lu­tion, and to replace these fil­ters of view­ing with more neu­tral fil­ters that release the nar­ra­tive.

The works in this exhi­bi­tion explore how we fil­ter the pol­i­tics of what would be “inter­est­ing” for us to know in order to cre­ate coher­ence. They inves­ti­gate the chasm between trauma and nar­ra­tive in the space where artists can cre­ate works that may in fact “doubt the premises of all the sto­ries.”

[Image: Lewis Baltz “Park City #61” (1980) Gelatin sil­ver print 8 x 10 in.]

Media

• Painting

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