NYAB Event - Katerina Marcelja and Amanda C. Mathis “Stripped”

Katerina Marcelja and Amanda C. Mathis “Stripped”

Gallery Molly Krom

This event has ended.

Gallery Molly Krom presents Stripped, a two artist show featuring sculptures by Katerina Marcelja and collages by Amanda C. Mathis.

Katerina Marcelja and Amanda C. Mathis have exhibited together before, which is hardly coincidental, considering the premise of their work. Both artists are concerned with “the history of artifacts found in abandoned domestic settings” (Marcelja) and with “the residue of human existence…, the pieces of history revealed through the architecture of our homes” (Mathis).

The assemblages by Katerina Marcelja are made from fragments found in abandoned dwellings and are formed with a random precision that reflects a careful dialog between the artist and the lived history of the artifacts. Stripped from their habitat, they stand as stubborn, cynical and yet ernest records of the passage of time, of unrelenting tides of habitation.

For Amanda C. Mathis the process begins with the exploration of various neighborhoods where she photographs homes, gravitating towards older dwellings. Using these photographs, she creates nonsensical compositions that repudiate the viewer’s expectations of what should be occurring in the picture plane. There exists a contradiction between the seamless, flat quality of the collage surface and the spatial complexity created by the juxtaposition of the images.

The title of the exhibit, Stripped, was a subject of some debate among the artists and the curator because of its potential reference to the frequently used, and even more frequently misused, notions of “deconstruction/construction” as well as a somewhat more sophisticated reference to Duchamp’s work, but the exhibit is about neither. Stripped refers to the act of intervention and defiance that is delegated to art as it responds to the “dictates” of form in architecture in particular, and in life in general. Architecture dictates proportions and relations among the elements of the building, positioning of plumbing, construction of a piece of furniture, designs for a block of dwellings. The dictates of life are in its course and the fate of memories. For Marcelja and Mathis, their act of resistance to these dictates is a gesture, simultaneously playful and tragic, since the intent is to hold on to the remnants of memories stripped from their source.

Katerina Marcelja was born in Las Vegas, Nevada and grew up in Italy. She studied sculpture at Boston University and performance in NYU. Her recent exhibitions include Wet Wings and Wooden Sail at Giacobetti Paul Gallery, Insubstantial Evidence at Douglass Street Music Collective Gallery , and Fragment Series at Open Source. She exhibited at Gallery Molly Krom in December 2013 in Flights of Love.

Amanda C. Mathis was born in Orlando, Florida. She received her BFA from the University of Central Florida (2004) and her MFA from Pratt Institute (2006). She had executed large scale installations for her solo shows at James Nicholson Gallery ( New York) and Smack Mellon ( New York). Her work has been included in group exhibitions at Smack Mellon, Kunsthalle Galapagos, the Freedman Gallery at Albright College ( Reading, Pa), Open Source Gallery( New York) and the Visual Art Center of New Jersey ( Summit, NJ). Mathis has participated in the Artist in the Marketplace program at the Bronx Museum of Arts, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Workplace Program, and the Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts residency. She was a winner of a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant in 2012.
This is her first show at Molly Krom.

Both artists live and work in Brooklyn, New York.