NYAB Event - Russell Floersch “From Denim”

Russell Floersch “From Denim”

Rooster Gallery

This event has ended.

Russell Floersch’s second solo exhibition at Rooster Gallery, “from Denim,” focuses on the mute forms of the familiar—objects (and fragments thereof), suspended in their own material histories, where the accretions of time and (dis)use have transformed them into talismans of a distant past, even as they occupy our attention in the space of the present. The title of the show refers to an era in the past, in the heady passage of politics and culture from the psychedelic 60s into the defiant yet cynical 70s, which indelibly stamped themselves into the memory of those who lived through them. The exhibition consists of two intimately connected types of objects—small, free-standing ‘sculptures’ derived from simple objects of humble origin: the push buttons from a Soundesign 8-track tape player, the flat, grooved expanse of a vinyl record, the elliptical form of a vintage VW tail light, and so on; and wall-hung paintings that pick up on the fragmented, abstracted forms of these objects.

In both cases, the works bear the accretion of many layers of paint, built up to become an index of the span of time, of memory, and of the act of making that each of them seeks to preserve. The objects of this makerly process become transformed in the process, as they oscillate in a twilight space between thing and image. Floersch seems to have found in these works what Walter Benjamin, in his “Little History of Photography” identified as “the inconspicuous spot where in the immediacy of that long-forgotten moment the future nests so eloquently that we, looking back, may rediscover it.” Ultimately, these works make an uneasy peace with the past, as they highlight the communally shared yet deeply personal relationship we all continue to have with these material histories.

- Beth E. Wilson