NYAB Event - David Dixon “Harvestings from Cathouse FUNeral”

David Dixon “Harvestings from Cathouse FUNeral”

RYAN LEE

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RYAN LEE announces David Dixon: Harvestings from Cathouse FUNeral, an installation of work completed over the last year that takes its impetus from Dixon’s artist-run space in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. The exhibition includes work “harvested” from his curatorial and artistic vision within Cathouse FUNeral, using materials and motifs from the gallery’s past year of exhibition design to realize new, highly charged, referential objects.

Cathouse FUNeral is a unique space given its collaborative and additive nature. Housed in a former funeral home, this alternative “project space” is down the hall from Dixon’s studio, and is bordered by several other working artists’ studios, creating an intuitive, collaborative environment. One of Dixon’s curatorial innovations is to keep exhibition design elements from past shows in present ones, which provides a formal and narrative continuity between shows and alleviates the return to a “neutral” white space. Another is the art pieces on view at RYAN LEE, which are made from the changing conditions of each exhibition. The space then becomes the producer, and Dixon merely the catalyst or “farmer”. This speaks to the artist’s interest in non-systematic processes and a succinct recognition of memory, history, relics, and labor.

The work on view comes from four distinctive exhibitions at Cathouse FUNeral: Shrink It, Pink It; For the Love of Agnes and Barney; The Hunt; and Heroic Social Worker (Dirty Hands, Clean Money). References include Agnes Martin and Barnett Newman, the consequences of art labor, and the limits of the material world. The first instance of the space creating a work of art came during the interim between Shrink It, Pink It and For the Love of Agnes and Barney. While deinstalling Shrink It, Pink It, a two-by-four that had capped the end of a temporary pink wall emerged as a perfect Barnett Newman “zip”, which was then exhibited in For the Love of Agnes and Barney. Since then, each show has produced art pieces. Other works on view include grey and pink horizontally striped gypsum board (For the Love of Agnes and Barney) and complex emotive assemblages that incorporate mirror, blood, arrows, and stained wood paneling (The Hunt).