Michele Abeles . Josh Kline,  Stewart Uoo   “blue monday ”

47 Canal (291 Grand St.)

This event has ended.

“blue monday” is a group exhibition featuring works by Michele Abeles, Josh Kline, and Stewart Uoo.

Time is pulled tightly into focus in Michele Abeles’s series of street photography, titled Watches (2014). Closely fixed on the glint of wrist watches of figures in motion––women who are out shopping, maybe returning from a smoke break––the large compositions read almost like adverts through the contradictory nature of their messages. They remind you that time is for sale, but timelessness is what you actually desire. Moving out from the studio and onto the street, Abeles still renders her special type of temporal and spacial dislocation in the flatness of her arrangements. Here, the images are cropped so closely on their subjects that they seem to suspend or float through the streets of any generic city. There exists a seemingly exhaustive familiarity of unbreakable archetype that’s repeated and tethered between this life and the next.

Stewart Uoo’s steel frame sculptures Security Window Grill X and Security Window Grill XI (both 2014), summon a kind of half-life of placeless-ness that regenerates like the accumulation of detritus on the street. Installed at the height of a basement window, the works refer to the fixtures of vernacular architecture in the city, the endless backdrop to our daily commutes. Except Uoo’s hard objects are partially wrapped in flesh-like artifice, reminiscent of umby-cord from Cronenberg’s 1999 sci-fi horror film eXistenZ, about a virtual reality game come to life. Underneath, the fleshy bits sprout lines of hair like the fringe of an eccentric garment. Using the techniques of special effects make-up artists, they are comprised of layers and layers of tinted silicone that have been cast like grafts taken straight from the artist’s own skin. The result is a manufactured grotesqueness that stirs an undeniable curiosity. They sit exaggerated, glistening, languishing in their liminality.

Barely imperceptible are the dark silhouettes of blood bags, resting on their sides within translucent frosted coolers illuminated from the light pedestals below. The Power of Positive Thinking, Internal Disinformation, and Almost a Cleaning (all 2013–2020), are a continuation of Josh Kline’s liquid sculptures doped with various mood altering and performance enhancing substances, like studies in the cycle of late-capitalist labor and consumption as extreme sport or just plain survival. Here, the works are brought into the present moment with materials such as Hydroxychloroquine and bleach, a nod to the hyper-influence of political media that has crystalized into a disquieting frenzy of nationalism, edging on the paradox of life and death.

Michele Abeles (b. 1977, New York) lives and works in New York City. She received an MFA from Yale University in 2007. Recent solo exhibition include “October,” 47 Canal, New York; and “world cup,” Sadies Coles, London. Her work has been exhibited internationally at the Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Vienna (2019); Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2015); Museum of Modern Art, New York (2014, 2012); Fridericianum, Kassel, Germany (2013), among others. Her work is included in public collections including the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Aïshti Foundation, Jal el Dib, Lebanon; Dallas Museum of Art; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Rubell Family Collection, Miami; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

Josh Kline (b. 1979, Philadelphia, USA) lives and works in New York. Kline’s work has been exhibited internationally at Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo (2020); Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin, Italy (2016); Portland Art Museum, Oregon (2016); and Modern Art Oxford, UK (2015), among others. He has participated in group exhibitions including the Whitney Biennial, New York (2019); “New Order: Art and Technology in the Twenty-First Century,” Museum of Modern Art, New York (2019); MoMA PS1, New York (2013, 2012); and “2015 Triennial: Surround Audience,” New Museum, New York, among others. His work has also been exhibited at Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2019); Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco (2019, 2015); ICA Boston (2018); MOCA Cleveland (2018); The Hirschhorn Museum, Washington DC (2016); Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2016); Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo (2015); KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2016); ICA Philadelphia (2014); and the Fridericianum, Kassel (2013). His work is included in the collections of numerous institutions including Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Aïshti Foundation, Beirut, Lebanon; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; and the Rubell Family Collection, Miami.

His upcoming film, Adaptation, will premier at LAXART in February 2022, on the occasion of his first solo exhibition in Los Angeles.

Stewart Uoo (b. 1985) lives and works in New York City. His recent solo exhibition, “used,” was on view at 47 Canal, New York in spring of 2021. He has participated in group exhibitions at K11 Art Museum, Shanghai (2017); David Roberts Art Foundation, London(2016); Aïshti Foundation, Jal el Dib, Lebanon (2016); MoMA PS1, New York (2015, 2014); ICA London (2015); the Fridericianum, Kassel (2015); the 10th Gwangju Biennale (2014); the 14th Venice Architecture Biennale (2014); the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2013); and the Kunsthalle Oslo (2011). His work is also included in several public collections including the High Museum of Art, Atlanta; Aïshti Foundation, Jal el Dib, Lebanon; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and the Rubell Family Collection, Miami.

He is currently participating in “Looking Back / The 12th White Columns Annual,” selected by Mary Manning at White Columns, New York.