Nov
21
to Dec 28
Filtering by: exhibition
Oct
4
6:00 PM18:00
AISTĖ KISARAUSKAITĖ /Sorrow, or Roses in Dad’s Memory II
10.04 – 10.26 /2019
OPENING RECEPTION:
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 4, 6 – 9 PM
ADDRESS:
Sla307 Art Space
307 W. 30th St. New York, NY 10001
BY APPOINTMENT ONLY:
347 533 0481 / 917 584 0579
To honor THE MEMORY OF VINCAS KISARAUSKAS, an acknowledged Lithuanian artist, Undercurrent invited Aistė Kisarauskaitė to organize a special exhibition at Sla307 Art Space
When thinking about exhibitions in far-off lands, and especially on other continents, the first question is always “how can we move these works of art?” Transporting material objects remains a problem.
After artist Vincas Kisarauskas’s father (my grandfather) perished in an accident, Kisarauskas created the work Sorrow, or Roses in Dad’s Memory (1971, oil on canvas, 122 x 91.5 cm). My father himself died on October 27, 1988, in New York. However, we were only able to bid farewell to his ashes, which arrived in Lithuania after unexpected effort.
Now, with an opportunity for me to exhibit work in New York, it is paramount that I honor my father by creating roses in his memory. However, contemporary US regulations forbid importing freshly cut roses or potted rose shrubs. I can place no living roses at the site of his death. No living and material symbol of mourning. Preparing for a regular flight, though, and reading the Ryanair baggage rules, I found that “The carriage of ashes is permitted as cabin baggage, and may be carried in addition to your normal cabin baggage allowance provided that a copy of the death certificate and the cremation certificate accompanies them. You must ensure that the ashes are securely packaged in a suitable container with a screw-top lid and protected against breakage.” As such, this work is positioned to start a discussion about longing and distance. About the longing for those who have dematerialized.
Aistė Kisarauskaitė
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Image: Aistė Kisarauskaitė, Urn I, 2019, from a series of 3. Rose ashes, resin
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Translated from Lithuanian to English by Moacir P. de Sá Pereira
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Exhibition’s PDF HERE
LIŪDESYS ARBA ROŽĖS TĖVUKUI ATMINTI II
Mąstant apie parodas tolimesnėse šalyse ir ypač kituose kontinentuose, pirmiausia kyla mintis apie kūrinių gabenimo galimybes. Materialaus objekto transportavimas vis dar yra problema.
Vinco Kisarausko tėvui (mano seneliui) žuvus avarijoje, jis sukūrė paveikslą “Liūdesys arba Rožės tėvukui atminti” (1971, dr., al., 122 x 91.5 cm). Mano tėvas menininkas Vincas Kisarauskas mirė 1988 m. spalio 27 d. Niujorke. Mes galėjome atsiveikinti tik su jo pelenais, kuriuos tuomet neįtikėtinomis pastangomis pavyko atsisiųsti.
Dabar, atsiradus progai padaryti parodą Niujorke, taip pat atrodo svarbiausia atiduoti pagarbą savo tėvui, sukurti rožes jo atminimui. Tačiau pagal šiuolaikines įvežimo į Jungtines Amerikos valstybes taisykles skintas rožes ar jų atžalas bei sodinukus įvežti draudžiama. Jokių gyvų rožių negalėčiau nugabenti ir padėti mirties vietoje. Jokio gyvo ir materialaus gedulo simbolio. Ruošdamasi paprastam skrydžiui ir skaitydama aviakompanijos Ryanair taisykles, radau “Pelenus leidžiama vežti kaip rankinį bagažą ir jie gali būti vežami papildomai prie Jūsų vieno įprasto rankinio bagažo vieneto, tačiau būtina, kad su jais būtų mirties liudijimo kopija ir kremavimo pažymėjimas. Privalote užtikrinti, kad pelenai būtų saugiai supakuoti tinkamame inde su užsukamu dangteliu ir apsaugoti nuo sudužimo. ”Taigi, šis kūrinys ir skirtas kalbėti apie ilgesį ir atstumus. Apie ilgesį tų, kurie dematerializavosi.
Aistė Kisarauskaitė
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Atvaizdas: Aistė Kisarauskaitė, Urna I, 2019. Rožių pelenai, plastinė masė
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Ačių už vertimą iš lietuvių į anglų kalbą Moacir P. de Sá Pereira
Oct
3
to Nov 9
AFTER LIGHT
10.03 – 11.09 /2019
OPENING RECEPTION:
THURSDAY, OCTOBER 3, 6 – 9 PM
GALLERY HOURS: THUR–SAT, 12–7 PM
ELISABETH ROTH + MICHAEL VILLARREAL
MEGAN STROECH + ASHLEY JONAS + SAAR
SHEMESH
Windows have a universal impact; they let light in, frame our view of the exterior, act as portals into another space, and aptly provide an escape/exit. In the 18th century Western Civilization, shopkeepers began integrating large openings and glass windows to brighten a dark shop-room, yet more significantly to draw attention from the outside inwards. Alternatively, audiences from sidewalk pedestrians—a marketing strategy bridging the domestic/private/familiar and the public/commercial/foreign—became a middle-class pastime with arcades developing, bridging class and the practice of window shopping. After Light spring-boards from this social phenomena of the idea of looking but not buying. One can buy a window accessory, a view, even airspace, but ironically no one can purchase daylight. The artists’ work in After Light punch holes into the capitalistic mirage that everything is for sale. One cannot buy time; By churning the impossibility of commodifying daylight, these artists throw shade on access, ownership/tangibility, utility, and class in our current social, political, and ecological climate.
Elisabeth Roth’s cyanotypes frame what is not visible - sunlight. Cyanotypes are an early, affordable form of photography using a paper that is coated with a light sensitive chemical. That which is exposed to the UV light cures to a dark shade of blue and what is blocked is washed away with water. Roth’s sun-drenched work fill their frames with fragmented curtains. While trying to capture light there is a counteraction of material decay. Strong in contrast, visually delicate, presence through absence, and like a worn in couch, molded to the body of its owner. Roth masterfully and minimally creates a work about the invisible by merely blocking out the light.
Insulation foam, wood, and paint are raw construction materials Michael Villarreal utilizes to shape his work depicting disheveled blinds. Yoked between painting and bas-relief sculpture, his blinds ooze humor through their corporeal/anthropomorphic presence. Ripe with confrontation, the blinds physically enter our space, and sarcastically deny us any visual egress; tongue-and-cheek in nature, Villarreal stealthily withholds access, all while teasing, coaxing us to want what’s on the other side. This sort of pussyfooting between give and take augments concerns and abuses of space, immigration, and manipulation—Materials that are used to insulate here become walls to shut out.
Integrating printmaking techniques, free-hand painting, and various solid and patterned fabrics, Megan Stroech creates large collage wall pieces that all at once teeter between object and aerial views of still lives. A browser of local dollar and discount stores, Stroech goes further than gleaning from the excessively decorative window displays, and integrates and/or imitates the affordable, mass produced materials themselves. Plaids, paisleys, and hand-painted looping lines lasso low-brow elements together, grounding them in the Americana nostalgia of picnics and the Wild West while simultaneously creating a high brow sensibility of ownership in the shadow of the fine art commodity. Indiscriminately embracing irony, Stroech defies class, and spins high and low material culture to challenge ideas about commodity and access.
Deeply invested in the question of utility (a ceramist’s dilemma), Ashley Jonas integrates both found utilitarian materials and ceramic pieces, creating free-standing sculptures. These banal materials are old, used, and marked up, consisting of pieces of wood, sink basins, garden edging, and thread, objects that served to enhance our lives and disposed of once completed or broken. Not all materials are created equal. In some states, clay can be reclaimed. It can be returned to its wet, moist body, to again be cut, thrown, shaped, pinched, and coiled. It’s final act as container, to hold and carry liquid, can be shattered, yet Jonas argues that too is part of its “job.” It’s no wonder that clay’s mantra, “Of Many Lives,” is adopted to other utilitarian objects, redefining their reliability to function in a new way. Sustainably and gracefully, Jonas frames new purpose and new identities into fragments bound to the same law we all follow: gravity.
Not far from any of these works exists Saar Shemesh’s Louie, a bronze cast cat. To Shemesh, Louie is the incarnation of humanity, what it means to be human—to live, suffer, grieve, loss, have strength, soul, and love. Louie becomes the ambassador for our escape as well as our memento mori. Basking in the “light,” it is unclear if he is asleep, awake, or dead, eerily tethering him to the old saying, “curiosity killed the cat,” and our own human errors, individually, socially, and universally as time runs out. Hung in our windowless basement, these works forge hope and new dialogues by refracting stereotypical characteristics of display, framing, visibility, and utility, pushing for new formats and alternative perceptions. We cannot buy back time, let us draw a new window and new solutions. After all, there is no time like the present to make a change.
Curated by Daina Mattis, Co-Director
Image: Michael Villarreal A Little Birdie Told Me, 2016, 31.5 x 23.5 x 5 in. Spray paint, primer, joint compound, and insulation foam on panel
Exhibition PDF HERE
Sep
5
6:00 PM18:00
RODNEY DICKSON /Paintings 2009 – 2019
09.05–09.28 /2019
OPENING RECEPTION:
THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 5, 6–9 PM
GALLERY HOURS: THUR /FRI /SAT 12–7 PM
Three different aspects of Rodney Dickson’s creative interests are on display at his new show, Paintings 2009–2019, at Undercurrent. The descending stairway at Undercurrent’s entrance displays 22 of Dickson’s sketchbooks, all black and identical in size, suggesting 22 Gideon Bibles from 22 hotel rooms. Attached to the wall, the sketchbooks descend with the floor line. Inside, one finds more than two thousand black charcoal drawings, notes, and project ideas. The drawings depict faces, nudes, and some landscapes, and the somewhat private sketches are very direct, swift and expressionistic in style and impulse. Often the charcoal imprints itself on the opposing page. Large black and white masses on paper suggest monumental ambition, and they also led us to display the sketchbooks intact, like Assyrian tablets, rather than as individual paper drawings on the wall. Presenting the sketchbooks this way leads us to a larger appreciation of the artist’s process as whole.
Rodney Dickson is best known in New York for his large, extremely thickly executed oil paintings. They are abstract, but their presence is so physical, and at the same time visceral, that they confuse, question, and blur the line between what is abstract and what is real. These paintings do not imply, allude, or refer to either landscape or figure. However, the thickness and viscosity of the paint itself suggests the magnitude of internal, inner friction in its physical and metaphysical senses. In a way, Rodney’s paintings state that the act of creation is first and probably the only real thing. Some paintings appear as though they were executed in one day, but most were painted, scraped over, and painted again. Through this process, the paintings become sculptural terrains of paint and color. The thick paintings take forever to dry; it can take up to 10 years for the oil paint to harden fully. In the meantime, the paint shrinks dramatically, changes color, and collects layers of dust. These processes of aging and time are much more present in Rodney’s paintings than their smoother, slicker cousins by other artists. Typically, an art work is considered finished when artist has stopped working on it. In this case, the artist plays a part in a multi-year process that gives the painting its final visual appearance. Only when they are only fully dry and hard, with no fluid liquid left in them, with all their time-formed textures, reminiscent of skin, is that appearance available to the viewer.
Importantly, Rodney Dickson’s works are not monochromatic, cool, minimalist objects. He paints using the complexities of whole range of colors. His paintings are not simple; they are suggestive and open-ended. They are the opposite to rational, industrial, execution-style art projects. Rodney Dickson’s art has more in common with Monet, or Delacroix, or Van Gogh, and the more romantic, emotional, and baroque side of abstract expressionism. Theatrical play with light and shadows creates separate, whimsical sides for these paintings. In Paintings 2009-2019, we have several examples of these paintings, anchoring the exhibition.
The largest piece, never before exhibited, is Shanty Town, occupying an entire wall. You can see this work as an installation, or as a painting; it is a collage of colorful stapled, canvasses/rags. Dickson began it in 2011, and the work remains in progress. In some way, the work is a political piece about globalization, poverty, and real estate. But it also suggests a very poetic, almost nostalgic, rags to riches myth. On the formal or art historical side, it can be interpreted as an artist studio. Through the ages, artists have depicted their studios, giving them the opportunity, as with self-portraits, to make a statement about the world and themselves. Recall all the Rembrandts, Courbets, Kahlos, Van Ghoghs, Braques… In the same vein, Dickson creates a piece that in its spirit resembles Rothko’s paint- and pigment-soaked canvases. But in this work the rags, used by painters for millennia to clean their brushes, are the main actors, covered in the Hollybollywood flavor of glitter.
Julius Ludavičius, Co-Director
Image: Shanty Town, 2011–present. Rags, tempera. Dimensions variable