“Condo New York” Exhibition

Company

This event has ended.

Company Gallery
Diana Lozano, Marisa Takal
Hosting

Carlos/Ishikawa, London
Rose Salane

Preview: Friday, June 29, 12 - 8 pm & Saturday, June 30, 12 - 6 pm
Summer Hours: Tuesday - Saturday, 12 - 6 pm

Carlos/Ishikawa presents Indigo237, a solo exhibition by Rose Salane. This exhibition comes as the first iteration of an ongoing dialogue between Rose Salane and Deborah Rodi. The objects and images included were collected by Deb from 1981 through 1993 — years she spent working at Windows on the World, the restaurant formerly located on the 107th floor of the World Trade Center North Tower.

In 1981, at 23 years of age, Deb was working in a New York City that was in process of assuming a new identity. Her position as reservation agent at Windows on the World allowed her to witness the city’s changes from an elevated observation point in the new World Trade Center towers. First proposed in 1943, in construction from 1966 and completed in 1973, the WTC was designed and built to stand as a symbol of growth, international corporate modernity and global world trade. The towers bridged the gap between two economic eras in the city, one defined by an economy fueled by manufacturing and its su porting industries; another defined by finance, insurance and real estate.

From 1972 until around 1993, New York developed a vast low wage service economy to support its growing financial services industry. Although this new economy helped the city pull itself out of the financial crisis of the 1970s, the transition had a polarizing effect on New York’s overall economy with widened wealth gaps and greater social inequalities. Large sections of the population were unable to participate in the benefits of this new economy. At the time the city experienced dramatic increases in crime, drug use, and of course, the AIDS epidemic.

The show is structured using a series of five texts written by the artist in consultation with Deb. Formatted as news clippings, the works follow a chronology and build out their respective narratives as collaged translations of her offered testimonies. Each article is anchored by an artifact as sound bite—the pairings reflect Deb’s typical day-to-day within the work environment at Windows. Days that would include swaying hanging plants and moving toilet water due to the wind’s effects on the towers at such high altitudes. The disappearance of co-workers in the unaddressed internal war of AIDS becomes more frequent as the 80s proceed. Appearances by well-known figures, such as Nancy Reagan speaking on behalf of her “Just Say No” anti-drug campaign, as well as run-ins with Grace Kelly and Andy Warhol, leading up to the 1993 bombing in the basement of the North Tower, shape Deb’s 12 years at Windows on the World.

This exhibition seeks to enter history through the pedestrian entrance into a pre-9/11 city. The World Trade Center had always been an idea as much as a working plan or any realized physical structure. In a post-9/11 city, this point of view would be otherwise unavailable—the information in this exhibition was only accessible through a conversation with a witness.

Rose Salane (b. 1992, New York) received her BFA from The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in 2014, in 2019 she is expected to receive her Masters in Urban Planning from Bernard & Anne Splitzer school of Architecture at the City College of New York. Her recent solo shows include All These Events Are True, But None of Them Happened (2018) at Carlos/Ishikawa, London, High From the Other Side, Jeffrey Stark, NY (2015) and Who Isn’t Seeing Someone?, Four A.M., NY. Salane has also recently participated in The Skies and the Atmosphere’s Most Luscious, Allen and Eldridge at James Fuentes Gallery New York (2017) and Spring Awakening, at Francesca Pia, Zurich (2016).

Company Gallery is proud to present an exhibition of sculptures by Diana Lozano and paintings by Marisa Takal.

Diana Lozano’s hand-sculpted works commingle botanical imitations, scandent vines and tufts of leaves, with a vernacular of ornamental accessories and jewelry. Drawing from cultural memory, these biomorphic sculptures combine the incidental elegance of nameplates and charm bracelets with an innate knowledge of horticultural forms, inherited from her parents, both botanists. These embellished chimeras offer visual narratives into performative gender—posing accesorization as both constructed and found in nature, while considering the scope of personal history, trauma, and popular culture. Eroding delineation between botanical and fabricated objecthood, earrings, flowers, charms hang suspended from ropes and hooks; forming elevated canopies of verdant scale that extend into anthropomorphized identity, desire and performance.

Marisa Takal’s brightly abstracted paintings externalize a fraught relationship to time and work. Notations of clocks, calendars, and grids surveil productivity; imagery that is loomed over by post-election dread and proliferating anxieties in a capitalist landscape. Assuaged with neurotic interruptions, flourishes of paint — bodily, organic, imperfect — halt the demarcation of time. Disruption is further punctuated by humor: self-deprecation and irony smile out in the face of a pig. These abstracted systems play out an active struggle—a haphazard construction of rigidity that exposes Takal’s defiance, frustration and joy as she navigates banal fantasy.

Diana Lozano (b. 1992, Cali, Colombia) received her BFA from The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in 2013. She currently lives and works in Brooklyn. She has shown at the General Consulate of Colombia in New York, Fisher Parrish Gallery, AMO Studios, La Mama Galleria, Splatterpool Art Space and former 99¢ Plus Gallery in New York, Casa Prado in Colombia, and Open Space in Baltimore.

Marisa Takal (b. Montclair, NJ, 1991) received her BFA from San Francisco Art Institute in 2013. Takal has since shown in numerous solo, duo, and group shows at such venues as: Night Gallery, Los Angeles; Bolsky Gallery at Otis College of Art in Design, Los Angeles; Jeffrey Stark, New York; Alter Space, San Francisco; and Interstate Projects, Brooklyn. In 2016, she was named the recipient of the Rema Hort Mann Foundation Emerging Artist Award and the Stanley Hollander Award. She lives and works in Los Angeles.