Ree Morton, Mark Morrisroe and Willie Doherty Exhibition

Alexander and Bonin

poster for Ree Morton, Mark Morrisroe and Willie Doherty Exhibition
[Image: Architectural model of gallery, courtesy of Bade Stageberg Cox]

This event has ended.

Alexander and Bonin presents the opening of their newly-renovated gallery at 47 Walker Street in Tribeca on Saturday, October 15, 2016 with solo exhibitions of Ree Morton, Mark Morrisroe, and Willie Doherty. Founded in Soho in 1995, Alexander and Bonin held a program of exhibitions for eighteen years on Tenth Avenue in Chelsea. The gallery will return to downtown Manhattan to a 7,000 square foot space, redesigned by New York-based architects Bade Stageberg Cox. The exhibition space will occupy two floors divided into distinct areas, including a video gallery on the lower level.

“We are very excited to be on Walker Street in Tribeca. Our building and the rest of the block feels like downtown in the 1970s, when the focus was on art rather than the market. The new space is approximately 75 percent bigger than our former Chelsea gallery, with natural light on the ground floor and controlled light at the lower level,” say gallerists Ted Bonin and Carolyn Alexander.

Inaugural Exhibitions

The ground floor exhibition will include several works by Ree Morton (1936-1977) that have not previously been exhibited in New York as well as works unseen since their original presentation during the artist’s lifetime. Column Piece was last shown at LoGiudice Gallery in 1972 and is emblematic of her “mapping” work—influenced by watching her children play outdoor sports. A 10 x 6-foot painting, mounted on a platform with wheels, diagrams the exhibition space in which it was shown. An “entrance” to the painting is directly echoed by Morton’s use of canvas on wood “bricks” which physically lay out the same “mapped” image on the floor surrounding the canvas and circling the columns of the gallery. Not exhibited since 1973, Column Piece highlights the architectural aspects of her work during this early period.

In For Kate (1976), Morton used celastic (a fiberglass-like material that can be manipulated into shapes resembling fabric) to create nearly the entire work, in which yellow, red, and pink roses on the wall surround a painted vignette of roses in a dramatic frame with two “ribbons” unfurled on either side. This work has never been exhibited in New York. First installed in Morton’s San Diego studio, and exhibited in a 1976 faculty exhibition at the University of California, San Diego, For Kate reflects the latter stage of Morton’s work—full of exuberant color, unexpected forms, and a celebratory attitude. For Kate was included in Be a Place, Place an Image, Imagine a Poem - Ree Morton: A Retrospective at Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid in 2015.

Something in the Wind is comprised of flags, which Morton hand-sewed for close friends, family, and fellow artists. First exhibited during the summer of 1975, when she rigged them from the deck to top masts of the Lettie G. Howard, docked at the South Street Seaport, the flags were later included in a lifetime solo exhibition at the University of Rhode Island, Kingston. At Alexander and Bonin, the flags will be exhibited pinned flat against a wall as they were in Kingston, alongside the original proposal drawings, sketches and a film documenting the South Street seaport installation. Another outdoor work, Regarding Landscape—originally created at Art Park in 1976—will be presented by the only known extent element: a painting of a bolder which was installed atop a boulder. Footage of this work and Morton’s performance “Maid of the Mist” are documented in Michael Blackwell’s Artpark documentary as well as footage found amongst Morton’s studio documentation.

On the lower level, a selection of photographs by Mark Morrisroe (1959-1989) will be on view. Morrisroe’s work was intrinsically tied to his elaborate personae and personal sexual and social relationships, for which he combined the diaristic with the melodramatic. He grew up in Boston and later attended art school, before moving to New York City in the mid-1980s. He worked with the immediate medium of Polaroid and experimented with various photographic processes, one of which being his elaborate “sandwich prints.” The works on view at Alexander and Bonin include eight C-Prints from this series—enlargements of double negatives of the same subject mounted on top of one another, which he would often manipulate, color, paint, and write on. The entirety of Mark Morrisroe’s estate is in the Ringier collection and is housed at Fotomuseum Winterthur. As a result, only those works sold or given to friends during the artist’s brief lifetime are in circulation.

Willie Doherty’s Passage (2006) will be installed in the lower level video gallery; the single-channel video will be projected directly onto a wall in the darkened space. Through his meditations in video and photography, Doherty (b. 1959, Derry) has addressed problems of representation, territoriality, and surveillance as well as the politics and rhetoric of identity, especially in his native Northern Ireland. Shot at night in the waste ground near a motorway that is audible in the background, Passage follows two men as they walk toward each other from opposite directions. The men are unaware of each other’s presence until they meet at an underpass. As they pass, each man looks back over his shoulder at the other and continues to walk. This moment of recognition and tension is repeated again and again in a sequence of cuts that shift from one figure to the other, confusing expectations of any potential narrative closure.

Media

Schedule

from October 15, 2016 to December 22, 2016

  • Facebook

    Reviews

    All content on this site is © their respective owner(s).
    New York Art Beat (2008) - About - Contact - Privacy - Terms of Use