Chivas Clem, Hanna Liden, Mark Flood Exhibitions
Maccarone
This event has ended.
Premiering on March 26th will be Chivas Clem's video, Library/Night, 2011. Set to a score by Morton Feldman, the piece is loosely based on a scene from Foul Play, a 1970's comedic thriller with Goldie Hawn. Clem uses the public library of his hometown of Paris, Texas as the setting for this short narrative in which an albino pursues a librarian through the labyrinth of stacks. The backdrop documents a peculiar index found in a small-town library's collection, with its strange, coincidental pairings of biographies; Calvin Klein and Melanie Klein, Tammy Wynette and Malcolm X. The fetishizing camera equates the librarian's body with the books, seducing the viewer with titles as one would the figure. Borrowing the traditional Hollywood tropes of the thriller genre, the video idiomatically contends that suspense, according to Roland Barthes, is itself about language, a delayed form of pleasure. In Library/Night writing itself serves as a kind of protagonist, a mute potential victim. Knowledge itself becomes metaphor for danger within the confines of this provincial community. In one scene, the librarian drops The Stepford Wives, Ira Levin's seminal text of feminist paranoia. Like Stepford, Paris morphs from charming little country town into fantasy of psychotic unchecked male authority, manifested by the Aryan cipher as menace. The theatrical staging and noir cinematography employs a campy nostalgia which heighten the fading romance of library-as-institution; a utopian shelter as digital media hastens its destruction. Additionally, Clem will display a sculpture TOTEM, 2011, comprised of nearly 1000 8-track cassettes, another example of an obsolete entertainment as a glamorous ruin.
Clem's limited edition artist book, THE BOOKSTORE, has been published in conjunction with the exhibition.
Chivas Clem lives and works in Paris, Texas and New York. This is his second solo exhibition with maccarone.
Maccarone presents Hanna Liden's "Out of My Mind, Back in 5 Minutes", the artist's first solo exhibition with the gallery. Well-known for her conceptual photographic explorations which often employ sculptural form as prop, Liden here displays a group of new three-dimensional work standing on its own, a series of handmade, labor-intensive yet seemingly effortless objects. With repetitious form and mutation of refuse, these discrete installations offer a meditation on urbanity. Liden takes common objects of plastic bags and T-shirts to harken the ubiquity ever-present within New York. Branded with a process-ridden impulse of multiplicity, the result is a gallery space turned reliquary, containing the ghosts of an urban tribe now obsolete.
Black plastic bags, originally conceived to mask a purchaser's taboo content, are now over-filled with poured plaster, conveying lightness to a substance that would otherwise feel weighty. Liden's hallowed T-shirts, coats of latex detritus shaping each into a stiff corpse, further coalesce her anthropomorphic study while simultaneously confronting the body's presence and absentia. A corner skull-hill serves as excavated remains of the city sidewalk's purposeful, durable material.
Also on view are three photographs in which Liden utilizes her iconographic language to recount this arranged sculptural situation. Lightning, a symbol of momento mori, functions as an evocative cue of humans irrepressible role in playing second-fiddle to nature. A suspended rock and pair of sneakers evoke a poetic fragility in tune with the lessons learned from this decaying consumer-ridden civilization, a portrait of our tenuous urban landscape. Although Liden's conceptual underpinnings could be deemed extreme, her application possesses a minimalist spirit, a subtlety that makes her milieu all the more believable and her reminder all the more crippling.
Hanna Liden lives and works in NY. Recent solo exhibitions include As Black As Your Hat, Half Gallery, NY (2010) and Fall Ten, Galerie Gmurzynska, Zurich (2010). Group exhibitions include Come as you Are Again, Salon 94 (2010), The Island, Miami, curated by Shamim Momin (2010), Adaptation, The Powerplant Toronto (2010), Fresh Hell, Palais de Tokyo Paris (2010), New York Minute, Macro, Rome (2008), and The Whitney Biennial: Day for Night (2006).
In the cavernous windows of maccarone, Mark Flood offers two pieces: "DO THE MATH" and "Monument to the Responsible Management of the Earth". His installation summarizes the implications of the K-T extinction event for our human community.
In collaboration with Zach Feuer Gallery.
Media
Schedule
from March 26, 2011 to April 30, 2011