“Pairing Down” Exhibition
Peninsula Art Space
[Image: Søren Aagaard "Tabletop Dolly" (still), (2014)]
This event has ended.
Peninsula Art Space presents Pairing Down, a group exhibition presented in collaboration with Residency Unlimited and curated by Marion Guiraud and Rachel Valinsky. Featuring the work of Søren Aagaard, Felipe Cohen, Diana Policarpo, Ariel Reichman, Pairing Down presents projects developed over the course of their residencies and elaborations on past works for the first time in New York.
The act of pairing down, understood as both a gesture of reduction and a splitting, doubling, or mirroring of processes or materials is a central tenant of the exhibition. Often employing an economy of means and paying attention to everyday objects to achieve evocative effects, Aagaard, Cohen, Policarpo, and Reichman make use of analogic and metonymic processes to reveal qualities of certain materials and surfaces, devise narrative strategies, draw attention to their surrounding environment, or explore forms of different forms of embodiment.
Søren Aagaard’s two-channel video Tabletop Dolly (2014) activates various modalities of autofictional narrative, exploring the interplay between the flow of voice-over and the flow of images culled from the artist’s 2010 photographic travelogue archive. Aagaard mixes registers of fiction, fact, and observation, describing modes of engagement organized around culinary experiences, tourist tropes, and national identity.
Felipe Cohen’s collages and sculptural works deploy everyday materials, including paper, cardboard, basalt, and glass, among others, to explore the constructive and often revelatory potential of simple objects. His minor interventions into the materials are nevertheless decisive transformations, that grant humble objects an ability to signify both their essential qualities and their movement across visual and perceptual registers.
Diana Policarpo’s Visions of Excess (2015) draws on Georges Bataille’s The Accursed Share to develop a sound-poem installation that attempts to reformulate a comprehensive theory of general and political economies from a feminist perspective. The artist’s voice within the installation sets up an embodied environment, converting excess and expenditure into immediacy and presence. At 8pm during the opening, Policarpo, Hannah Catherine Jones, and Camilla Padgitt-Coles will perform The Spheres. Through live improvisation, they will create imaginary landscapes and ethereal atmospheres, weaving sound with layered vocals, revisiting scenes from Music of the Spheres/Status Quo (1938), an unfinished opera for electronic instruments by Johanna Magdalena Beyer (Leipzig, 1888-New York, 1944).
Ariel Reichman explores the individual’s navigation between private and public spheres, through different visual modes of access. His video, My Mother, you see, she just doesn’t know how to light a lighter (2015) presents an intimate, repetitious gestural performance, enacted by the artist’s mother and her attempt to use a commonplace object for the first time. Reichman’s Barbed Wire painting similarly plays out themes of frustrated access, turning the wall into a boundaryscape, an abstract yet local structure that mediates aesthetic forms and modes of engagement.
Media
Schedule
from November 06, 2015 to November 22, 2015
Opening Reception on 2015-11-06 from 19:00 to 21:00
Performance of The Spheres 8pm by Diana Policarpo and Hannah Catherine Jones (sound) and Camilla Padgitt-Coles (visuals)
Artist(s)
Søren Aagaard, Felipe Cohen, Diana Policarpo, Ariel Reichman