NYAB Event - Martha Mysko “Broken Ground”

Martha Mysko “Broken Ground”

The West 10th Street Window

This event has ended.

Time Equities Inc. Art-in-Buildings presents at the West 10th Window: Martha Mysko, Broken Ground.

In Broken Ground, Mysko explores the multiple possibilities of a window as a place, metaphor, and digital space. Mysko employs the unusual shape and depth of the West 10th Window to call attention to it as a vitrine designed to showcase a product, while utilizing materials that recall a bedroom’s comfortable mess. The domestic-looking blinds create a division obstructing the full view of the installation and encouraging viewers to step around to the side windowpane to peek behind closed curtains.

Mining the rich art historical tradition of paintings as windows into other worlds, Mysko addresses the picture plane as a metaphorical space, juxtaposing domestic objects with digital collages of the object’s image. Installed together to create a trompe l’oeil effect, these objects and images depict an abject personal space in lurid salmon-pinks and turquoise.

Referencing glossy design flourishes, fashion magazines, and nineties teen style, Mysko completes this complex and hectic environment by layering images and materials in a disorientating fashion recalling multiple open windows on a computer screen. Much of the installation is read through or behind another element of the work, evoking the visual over-stimulation of digital spaces. The result is a swirling, layered installation that builds in complexity as the viewer tries to separate the object from the image, and the real from the unreal.

Martha Mysko (b.1982 Baltimore, MD) has had solo exhibitions at Sadie Halie Projects (2015, Brooklyn, NY); Marc Straus Gallery (2012 and 2014, New York, NY); Good Weather Gallery (2014, Little Rock, AR); and at Culture Room (collaborative, 2013, Brooklyn, NY). She has an upcoming two-person exhibition at Small Editions (March, 2016, Brooklyn, NY). Recent group exhibitions include Re/Post at Storefront Ten Eyck (2015), The Body Metonymic: International Contemporary Sculpture at Oakland University Art Gallery (2014), On Deck at MARC STRAUS (2013), and Peekskill Project V (2012) at Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art. In 2013 she was selected to participate in the Tacita Dean workshop/residency at the Fundación Botín in Santander, Spain. Martha received her MFA in Painting from Cranbrook Academy of Art in 2011.