NYAB Event - Nicola Ginzel “My Bed is Made of Atoms”

Nicola Ginzel “My Bed is Made of Atoms”

Cathouse FUNeral

This event has ended.

Nicola Ginzel presents a multiplicity of compact bundles of power that come from her hands only when hot. She categorizes these intuitions as “Elements” and “Fragments” both of which are assembled from meaningfully charged personal objects selected in daily experience, the difference being “Elements” are worked to abstraction becoming essence whereas “Fragments” retain referents that are sometimes cultural, sometimes natural, sometimes both.

In one piece, dirt from the infamous music-recording mecca, Muscle Shoals, Alabama, is mixed with mug wart, rose petals, and remnants of used clothing. Another piece quarters the perfect image of feminine adolescence represented on the top of a refined Viennese Demel chocolate box. There are assembled bits of bright orange towel and stucco wall found in Puerto Rico and from Cuba, respectively, and the velvety remains of a stuffed animal. A mango seed with traced florescent veins, a crushed cigarette box tailored in blue mesh, a twig, some snakeskin, kneecaps made from obscured objects, some are dusted gold.

Each work a lovingly considered miniature scaled to the hand, each a meditative innovation that evokes mantras or something tantric: the quotidian rendered sacred, the personal offered as universal, ephemera made concrete, broken bodies repaired with intention.

My Bed is Made of Atoms has work chosen from fifteen years of Ginzel’s intensive engagement transforming materials, with an emphasis on recent works chosen specifically to dialogue with Cathouse FUNeral’s ever evolving space.

From the artist: I want to illuminate the spaces between mainstream culture by emphasizing the mundane and commonplace. I hope the work conveys… that it is in simplicity and interaction where the essence of life’s breath resides, not in the end result or goal achieved.

The Tennessee Valley Museum of Art in Alabama originated a traveling ten-year retrospective of Ginzel’s work titled “Language, Symbol, Artifact” (2013). Other selected solo and two-person shows are “Critical Path” at Art 101 in Brooklyn (2012); “Gold and Monochromatic Fragments” at Heskin Contemporary in NYC (2011); “Shulchan Aruch,” at Jenny Jaskey Gallery in Philadelphia (2008); “Circle Series,” at Corridor Gallery in Reykjavik, Iceland (2006). Selected recent group shows include: “Distilled,” curated by Diana Erdos at Bernard Jacobson Gallery in New York City (2014) “Slow Enhancers,” Platform Gallery (2015) and “Soft Rains,” Prole Drift Gallery (2014) both curated by SEASON in Seattle, WA; “So Hot Right Now,” at Step Gallery at Arizona State University in Phoenix, AZ (2015); “Through the Vortex” at NARS Foundation in Brooklyn (2014), “In Situ or Turns” at Centotto Gallery in Bushwick, Brooklyn (2014); “IT/ness curated by David Gibson at Trestle Gallery in Brooklyn (2014). She was nominated for a Louis Comfort Tiffany Grant and has been the recipient of a grant from the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation and the Artists’ Fellowship Inc. Residencies include SIM—The Icelandic Visual Arts Association and Reykjavik Art Museum Residency and The Skaftfell Cultural Center Residency in Seydisfjördur, Iceland. Nicola is Austrian-American born in Hollywood, CA. She lives and works in Brooklyn.