NYAB Event - “We play at Paste” Exhibition

“We play at Paste” Exhibition

Lisa Cooley Fine Art

This event has ended.

We play at paste,
Till qualified for pearl,
Then drop the paste,
And deem ourself a fool.
The shapes, though, were similar,
And our new hands
Learned gem-tactics
Practicing sands.

-Emily Dickinson

Lisa Cooley presents a group exhibition titled We play at Paste that will include film, painting, and sculpture. The exhibition, which takes its title from a poem by Emily Dickinson.

Each artist in the exhibition works though certain media tropes, which are neither appropriated nor directly quoted, but rather percolate within the subconscious and manifest in highly idiosyncratic forms. The absorbed images are transformed to create a new vernacular of visual cues tangentially related to media, be it advertising, cinema, or magazines. Media acts as the landscape, the wallpaper, or the air, against which highly intimate and personal visual codes unfold, creating a complex constellation of meaning within the work. The works exist slightly out of time, suggesting a departure from the artist’s own time, or a reconciliation of sorts between past and present.

Anthea Hamilton will present Waitresses, a two-part work comprised of two sets of clear acrylic cut into simplified versions of a figure. The forms are based on Allen Jones’ rejected designs for the Korovo Milk Bar in Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange. Both forms offer only void spaces where the hostess’s tray and bottom would be, and are flattened into spare geometry. The two acrylic forms are set in a position in the room that renders them invisible at first view as they can only be seen by the refraction of their edges. Hamilton frequently extracts imagery from popular culture, which she then transforms into formal, associative sculpture. Here, the acrylic reads as both object and figure.

Lucy Kim’s series, Your Nose is My Nose, offers an amalgamation of different noses, lips, and chins in varying configurations, to suggest increasing malleability of the body. The painted profiles and eyebrows are lifted from fashion magazines. He Left with the Flounders is a stretched mold of a man in briefs repeated three times surrounded by flounders. Kim began by making thin silicone molds of the fish and the man, which she then assembled like a quilt. She stretched the silicone to the point of abstraction, used it as a mold for plastic, then coated the plastic with a painting of two classic silhouettes from men’s underwear ads. The flounders are significant in that they are born as normally round fish, and it’s only within the first few days of life that they flatten out. Similarly, Kim’s paintings fluctuate between two and three dimensions, as they try to create a physical, albeit distorted, link between an image and its subject.

Alan Reid’s newest works resemble early 20th century advertising posters for cosmopolitan cities. Reid’s rendition of lithe, beautiful women are merely western ideals of beauty, here, draped in dresses made from Saul Sternberg and Picasso drawings, also ideals of culture. In Reid’s work, two-dimensional flatness quickly gives way to sculptural relief. A pastiche of baguettes, clocks, and a single rudraksha bead are just a few of the symbols that Reid grants the viewer to decode his pictorial play, both literally and figuratively, between surface and depth.

Tamara Henderson’s 16mm films use visual tropes akin to those that might be seen in late twentieth-century documentaries, educational films, or vacation advertisements. Edited in camera, her films guide the viewer through a series of astounding and unusual edits and cuts. Drawing deeply from the unconscious, Henderson generates an oneiric space of desire where objects and environments are choreographed manifestations from her dreams. In Accent Grave on Ananas, for instance, Henderson translates the apparition of a pineapple in a dream into her film. In Gliding in on a Shrimp Sandwich, Henderson worked with Jeannine Han to create hand-marbled textiles in a hallucinatory domestic interior, set to music by Dan Riley.

In Ella Kruglyanskaya’s Accosted, female figures – painted, platonic forms of street photography, film stills, or cartoons – burst out of the painting’s intentionally uber-flat surface. Kruglyanskaya’s figures are both familiar and surprising, acting as gendered repositories of an all too coded, fictional, sexualized, female image, while exploding these codes through a playful and exuberant presence that draws her fictional women out of the painting and into the room.

Anthea Hamilton was born in 1978 in London where she currently lives and works. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including at Bloomberg SPACE, London; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Lisa Cooley, New York, the Barbican Art Gallery and Chisenhale Gallery, London and the Sculpture Center, New York. In 2012, she designed a poster for the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games. Forthcoming projects include Period Room at the Palais de Tokyo, a commission with Nicholas Byrne as part of Glasgow International Festival and Don’t You Know Who I Am? Art After Identity Politics at MuKHA, Antwerp, Belgium.

Jeannine Han is from the Bay Area and currently lives and works as an artist in New York. Maintaining an interdisciplinary practice, including textiles, fashion, sculptures, installations, video, sound, and collaborative works, she is interested in the history and recontextualization of women’s work. By re-imagining the uses for these processes and materials, an entire landscape of objects are created that both reference and provide a counter point to their origin. Her most recent work is a 16mm film in collaboration with Tamara Henderson called Gliding in on a Shrimp Sandwich. It has been exhibited at Lisa Cooley, New York; Disjecta Contemporary Art Center, Portland; and Galerie Nordenhake, Stockholm. Jeannine is currently an adjunct professor at Parsons The New School for Design.

Born in Sackville, New Brunswick, in 1982, Tamara Henderson is a Canadian artist who works in 16mm film, sculpture, drawing, and printed matter. She studied at Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax and the Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main. She holds a Masters Degree from the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm. Henderson has exhibited at dOCUMENTA (13), Kassel (2012); Rodeo, Istanbul; Magasin 3, Stockholm; Western Front, Vancouver, and Midway Contemporary Art, Minneapolis (all 2013). Recent solo exhibitions include: Evergreen Minutes of the Phantom Figure, Nuremberg Kunstverein (2013); Bottle Under the Influence (with Julia Feyrer), Walter Phillips Gallery. In 2014, she will present solo exhibitions at Galerie Nordenhake Stockholm, Grazer Kunstverein, Austria, and ICA Philadelphia with Julia Feyrer. She was shortlisted for the Sobey Art Award in 2013.

Lucy Kim was born in Seoul, Korea, and raised between Korea, Myanmar, and the United States. She received her BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2001 and her MFA from the Yale School of Art in 2007. She attended the Yale Summer School of Art and Music, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, the MacDowell Colony, and is the recipient of the Carol Schlosberg Memorial Prize and the Ellen Battell Stoeckel Fellowship from Yale. She is a founding member of the collaborative kijidome, and is currently Lecturer in Fine Arts at Brandeis University. Lucy Kim lives and works in Massachusetts. She will have her first solo exhibition at the gallery in Spring 2015, and will be included in an upcoming group exhibition curated by Michele D’Aurizio and Gea Politi at the Flash Art NY Desk in March 2014.

Ella Kruglyanskaya was born in 1978 in Riga Latvia, and currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She holds an MFA in painting from the Yale School of Art, New Haven, Connecticut, and a BA in painting from Cooper Union, New York. She has exhibited at Office Baroque, Antwerp (2013); Kendall Koppe Gallery, Glasgow (2013); Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, New York (2012); collectorspace, Istanbul, (2012); Salon 94, New York (2011) and White Columns, New York (2011), amongst others. In 2014 she will be the artist-in-residence at Studio Voltaire, London, where she will also hold a solo exhibition with an accompanying publication.

Alan Reid was born in 1976 in Texas and currently lives and works in New York. He holds degrees from the University of North Texas and the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, Maryland. Recent solo exhibitions include An Absent Monument at Mary Mary, Glasgow, currently on view, as well as Patricia Low Contemporary, Gstaad; Lisa Cooley, New York; A Palazzo, Brescia. He curated the exhibition Air de Pied-à-terre for the gallery in January 2013. Reid was included in the second edition of Phaidon’s Vitamin D.

Media

• Painting
• Sculpture
• Film

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