Sam Stewart “Cryptid”

Fort Gansevoort

poster for Sam Stewart “Cryptid”

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Fort Gansevoort presents Sam Stewart’s first solo exhibition, Cryptid. Stewart’s work, which traffics in the vocabulary of high-production furniture design, conveys twisted narratives through the act of obsessive world making. Exploring the perverse desires and sincere emotions that we project onto the things we own, his sculptures subvert the intended use of the items they resemble, and instead operate as symbolic totems. They are hybrids—simultaneously personal and anonymous, excessively bespoke and eerily ubiquitous.

The exhibition will take place on the second floor of a townhouse located at 3 Ninth Avenue, located directly next door to Fort Gansevoort and will be by appointment only. Zoned for residential use, the space is required by the Department of Buildings to include a shower in the bathroom, a sleeping surface, and a working kitchen among other prerequisites for daily living. Reflecting on these codes and their distinctions from commercial space, Stewart has created a series of objects that imagine the personal affects of a mythical occupant.

Modeled on fabled humanoid characters like Bigfoot or the Yeti, whose existence is unsubstantiated to the present, Stewart’s cryptid belongs to folklore and science fiction as well as everyday forms of self-generated mythology, such as data-driven consumer branding. From burled maple veneer and carbonized wood to white leather and chrome, his materials are imbued with mixed visual references: Appalachian folk craft of his childhood home, rustic luxury vacation lodges of Telluride, exotic cars, meat manufacturing facilities, and gym culture or the body industry, among others. The sculptures suggest real things that serve regular patterns of domestic life, such as sleeping, eating, and exercising. Through his synthesis of disparate aesthetic tropes, accidental uses of household objects, and their psychological associations, Stewart considers how, through successive rationalizations, mythologies gain momentum and permanence. It is through the telling and modification of stories over time, to where it doesn’t even belong to anyone or any event—is it fact? truth?—that the cryptid is given life.

Sam Stewart was born in North Carolina in 1988. He lives and works in New York. He earned a B.A. in Mathematics and Philosophy at St. John’s College in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He was most recently included in a group exhibition titled Ecotone which took place at Zaha Hadid’s one and only New York City condominium. Stewart’s work was included in Fort Gansevoort’s booth at NADA, New York 2017. Fort Gansevoort will be presenting a solo booth of Sam Stewart’s work at Collective Design fair in March, 2018.

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Schedule

from February 15, 2018 to March 24, 2018

Opening Reception on 2018-02-15 from 18:00 to 20:00

Artist(s)

Sam Stewart

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