Melissa Gordon “Mimetic Pleasures”

Boesky East

poster for Melissa Gordon “Mimetic Pleasures”

This event has ended.

Marianne Boesky Gallery presents Mimetic Pleasures, a solo exhibition of new paintings by Melissa Gordon. Mimetic Pleasures is the artist’s second solo show with the Gallery, and her first at BOESKY EAST.

A presentation of new works from Gordon’s ongoing Material Evidence series, Mimetic Pleasures takes up questions of authorship and abstraction as advanced in her longer-term bodies of work including Blow Up Modernists and Structures for Viewing. In these series, Gordon implements her particular cache of gestures - enlarging hidden details, zooming in on patterns of reproduction, and distorting information with abstraction in paintings, silkscreens and installations - to reconfigure histories, surfaces, and iconographies through a feminist lens. The works in Mimetic Pleasures revolve around the question “Who gets to be abstract?” or, in other words, whose paintings can appreciably be thought of as belonging to a tradition of primarily male artists – then and now – in whose work gesture is prioritized?

Gordon’s paintings are produced through a combination of provisional, accidental gestures – made by wiping off her brush on the studio wall during the process of painting – and studious, mimetic ones, whereby these initial marks are subsequently carefully replicated on canvas. The marks made on the painting’s surface thus belong to both the tradition of abstraction relative to a certain type of unconscious expressivity, and to procedures involving the reproducibility of images in modernity, two processes often thought to be somehow contradictory in their aims. Her technique in this series can thereby be said to participate in a continuing interrogation, in all of that word’s forensic connotations, of how we continue to receive Modernism in painting, derailing a conversation about “painting as painting” or “painting as such” towards more specific questions about the imaginary subject of the Modernist painter. Gordon draws attention to herself in that likely or unlikely role by mimicking herself in her own paintings, substituting for her own initial careless marks a deliberate and considered imitation, thus fetishizing whilst mocking the idea of the famous brush stroke.

Hung on unfinished walls, Gordon’s works mimic processes of production and display: clusters of paintings use photographic gestures, zooming in on a mark, showing a wider cropping, repeating subjects over time in stop motion and tracking across a surface. Here, the Abstract Expressionist splatter of Jackson Pollock is pitted against the careful composition of Piet Mondrian and the deadpan appropriation of Andy Warhol; the index becomes the icon. In Mimetic Pleasures, the studio door is flung open and maybe no one is in there. Only an imprint is left: a set of marks, studio walls with paint on them, paint still in mixing buckets and traces of work done.

Media

Schedule

from October 10, 2014 to November 09, 2014

Opening Reception on 2014-10-10 from 18:00 to 20:00

Artist(s)

Melissa Gordon

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