Michael Childress “LOVE & DEATH / The Entrance or The Exit”

New Release

[Image: Michael Childress "Aether Swell I" (2019) Acrylic on raw canvas 46 x 42 in.]

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New Release presents “LOVE & DEATH / The Entrance or The Exit”, Michael Childress’ first solo exhibition at the gallery. Two mirroring bodies of work, which Childress has dubbed Soft Tokens and Aether Swells, will be exhibited.

In the Aether Swells works, acrylic orbs create a tension between departure and return on raw canvas. The translation for swell or wave in French is houle, a word which originates from Old Norse as a cave or hole. This positive-negative duality resonates within the repeated form, suggesting an expanding force or a receding void.

In the Soft Tokens series, found photographs have been matched with color-aid paper. The paper’s tone amplifies the environment of the photograph while at the same time giving the found object a new association, history, and home. The date has been removed, yet it is understood that we are looking at something from the past, an artifact. An attempt to recall is eclipsed by an unsettling unknown.

Susan Sontag writes on (sometimes unfamiliar) photographs, “The lover’s photograph hidden in a married woman’s wallet…the snapshots of cabdriver’s children clipped to the visor - all such talismanic uses of photography express a dealing both sentimental and implicitly magical: they are attempts to contact or lay claim to another reality.”

In each of these bodies of work, a portal is presented, offering theoretical passages into new dimensions.

Michael Childress (b.1987, New York), was the recipient of the 2018 Leslie Lohman Museum Queer Artist Fellowship. He has exhibited in New York at Cuevas Tilleard, Radiator Gallery and False Flag. Childress curated a group exhibition “The Small Exceeds” at New Release in 2017. He received his BFA from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in 2009. Childress lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.