“SELF Check Out” Exhibition
Planthouse
This event has ended.
Planthouse re-opens its gallery space at 55 W. 28th Street, NYC. “SELF Check Out” is a two person show with work by Grayson Cox and Nadja Frank that positions the architectural space in the brain as a place that can be cleared, filled, played within, and even co-opted by external forces with manipulative intentions. In an age of screens and interfaces that compete for our attention, issues of boredom, rest and daydreaming are challenged. SELF Check Out contemplates this fertile ground as a site for play, curiosity and production; a place from which all life directions comes. The work examines the idea of “checking out” in its conflicting meanings, by addressing the issues of control in the built environment and freedom within our own minds, and asks the viewer to consider their own thresholds for intrusion and will. The show consists of sculpture in many forms, from wood furniture-like construction to hanging metal chandelier like installations, printmaking, photography screen printed sculptures that depict actual self check-out machines, window “screens” offering views of contemplative seascapes, and video constructed from edited clips of Terrence Malick’s entire film catalogue being shown to an iced coffee (one of the muses of ‘checking out’). The work is accompanied by an essay from the critic and writer Christopher Stackhouse, which is attached below.
Grayson Cox (b. 1979 in Indianapolis, IN) is a New York based artist working in a variety of media, from painting and printmaking, to photography and furniture-like sculpture. He received his BFA from Indiana University and his MFA from Columbia University in New York in 2010. Grayson is the recipient of the Daisy Soros Prize, the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation Artistic innovation and collaboration grant and has exhibited in New York and internationally including the Center for Contemporary Art, Warsaw, Poland; Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Tel Aviv, Israel; The School of the Art Institute of Chicago; The New Museum, New York; Elizabeth Foundation, New York; The Fisher Landau Center for Art, Queens, New York; Gowanus Studio Space; The Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art; the Sculpture Center in New York, and Gasser Grunert Gallery in New York.
Nadja Frank (b. 1980 in Lohr am Main, Germany) received her Diploma in Fine Arts with Honors from Hochschule für bildende Künste in Hamburg, Germany in 2008 and her MFA from Columbia University in 2011. She has exhibited internationally in numerous solo exhibitions including Denny Gallery, New York; 401contemporary, Berlin/London; Margini Arte Contemporanea, Massa, Italy; Galerie Conradi, Hamburg, Germany, and group exhibitions including Kolbe Museum, Berlin; Socrates Sculpture Park, New York; Kunstraum Kreuzberg, Bethanien, Berlin; ICAS Gallery, Singapore; Chelsea Art Museum, New York; Kunst und Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Bonn; Kunstverein Hamburg. In 2011 she received a DAAD scholarship and EAF Socrates Sculpture Park Fellowship.
Christopher Stackhouse is a writer, artist, curator and critic. His books include image/text collaboration with writer John Keene, Seismosis (1913 press); and a volume of poems, Plural (Counterpath press.) With artists Jared Friedman and Jomar Statkun, Stackhouse is a founding member of the roving artists in residence project This Red Door (see www.thisreddoor.com.) He teaches at the Maryland Institute College of Art.
Media
Schedule
from March 06, 2015 to April 15, 2015
Opening Reception on 2015-03-06 from 18:00 to 20:00