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December 10, 2005 - December 31, 2005
For this exhibition, Lozek will exhibit four new interior paintings. The nostalgically furnished, bizarrely decrepit rooms featured in Lozek’s paintings house young men dressed and coiffed in the style of the 1950’s. In these attic-like interiors, Lozek’s subjects find only the bare necessities of domestic life – a bed, a table and a chair. The architecture of the room itself is deteriorating – one notices detaching wallpaper, crumbling stucco and faulty masonry. For Lozek, the four walls of a room function as the most important refuge from daily life, yet his paintings give the impression that these places of intimacy and shelter are actually quite disturbing and instable in and of themselves. It is in the actual dialogue between the dilapidated rooms and the boyish figures that one ultimately finds the essential meaning of Lozek’s paintings. The young men depicted in Lozek’s paintings are closed within themselves, focused inwards and completing quotidian actions, which do not provoke additional questions.
In addition, Lozek will exhibit four new portrait paintings. Lozek finds his subjects in small newsprint photographs and dismantles their faces in his paintings, rebuilding and reassembling each face in a manner that ultimately seems mask-like and oddly detached. Aesthetically, Lozek’s portraits are heavily influenced by Social Realism and the hackneyed advertisements of the old German regime, while thematically, the portraits allow Lozek to represent his interest in the boundary, or rather the delicate balance, between the individual and the stereotype. For Lozek, the children depicted in these paintings do not exist as distinct individuals with mutable personalities. The figures are rigid, fixed and unchangeable. As a result, his portrait subjects are able to achieve a level of anonymity that allows them to function as a type. Lozek’s adolescent subjects are just a cross-section of all the disturbed and disturbing, troubled and troubling teens in the world whose neatly-parted haircuts, clean-cut clothes and good looks merely cover up a more violent and corrupt history.
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October 15, 2005 - December 3, 2005
"Who Slept With Who" was shot earlier this year in an abandoned prison in Mansfield, Ohio. Piene first learned about the incarceration structure while communicating with a prisoner from a nearby penal complex, who had a direct view of the old prison from his own cell window. When Piene entered the abandoned building for the first time herself, she found mounds of garbage and some of the former prisoners' possessions. Amongst this rubble, Piene came across two novels Moment of Love and A Stormy Affair. The discovery of these two books prompted Piene to become particularly interested in the men who slept in the prison beds, dreaming of the one thing that they were denied - the body of a woman.
For Piene, the Mansfield, Ohio prison served as a century-long staging point for dreams of sex and companionship. In "Who Slept With Who," Piene injects a group of real, living women into the prison and stages an after-the fact fulfillment of the prisoners' desires via a mutated soundtrack of female voices. Other scenes in "Who Slept With Who" are staged in a nearby motel, where and when Piene allows the object and subject of desire to ultimately become merged.
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September 9, 2005 - October 8, 2005
Chloe Piene's drawings inhabit and extend the German expressionist mood that oftentimes invents sharply delineated, visionary features in order to portray a human body that skirts along the boundaries between the physical and metaphysical worlds. Her charcoal on vellum drawings frequently depict cropped or only partly rendered bodies. These delicately drawn bodies appear as skeletal forms, scarcely covered with flesh and tissue. As a result, Piene's subjects appear to be caught in transitional states of corporeality, where and when the exact separation between the solid and the atmospheric becomes indistinct.
Piene approaches drawing with a purity and singularity that bucks the traditional framework in which drawing has lain. Her two major media, video and drawing, simultaneously display aspects of delicacy and brutality. Part I (Drawings) consists of a suite of new drawing work that refers back to the simplicity, complexity and action involved in rendering the human body, which, in the case of Piene's work, is usually her own.
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September 9, 2005 - October 8, 2005
Curated by Nu Nguyen
Ian Cooper's video "Constellations Align (BFF & GFF)" explores the adolescent notions of destined love and perfect companionship. Inspired by the well-known spaghetti scene from Disney's animated classic Lady and the Tramp, "Constellations Align (BFF & GFF)" depicts a world so heavily tilted by the cosmos that "star-crossed lovers" actually become physically entangled in a network of telephone cords. The video is a string of vignettes that alternate between two sets of partners - one pair of teenaged best friends and another pair of adult lesbian lovers. Cinematic split-screen effects are used throughout the video to join the four figures and trace their attempt to satisfy a common longing for connection. The seemingly endless loop of short vignettes appears to have no specific trajectory, affording time for the viewer to get caught up in the micro-dramas of coy finger play and flirtatious cord twirling
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July 9, 2005 - August 13, 2005
I was born in New York City and as a result have always been aware of living in a box. Add to this my height of 6'8", and you have what some might call a hypersensitivity to space.
- Adam Putnam, 2001
Adam Putnam creates haunted, psychosexual spaces through his practice in performance, photography and video. After years of doing performances where the body was the central focus of Putnam's art practice, the architecture of the interior has slowly taken over as his main point of departure. Putnam is particularly interested in the experience of architecture - how depicted spaces can become stages for things uncanny, creepy and anxiety-ridden. Through anamorphic manipulations of perspectival space and the constant pairing of body and architecture, Putnam explores the ways in which building interiors can contain an evil paranormal presence.
For his second solo show at Sandroni Rey, Putnam has attempted to make an empty space perform. In his video "...", Putnam turns the stage itself into an actor. Much like a proscenium, the space becomes charged with its own presence, in turn becoming the true subject of Putnam's work.
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May 28, 2005 - July 2, 2005
Soo Kim's recent works are a result of her exploration of the presence of time in photographs. For Kim, the photograph functions as a document of an event - a document that is taken within a fraction of a second, yet capable of representing a memory of a much longer event. In her newest body of work, Kim attempts to alter and elongate the photographed moment by hand-cutting voids into her photographs. The forms of these voids vary in shape, but all serve to inform the subject of the photographic image that exists just beyond the frame of the image. In this very manner, Kim is able to add elements of different narrative potentials to her photographs through the removal of actual parts of the photographed images.
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April 15, 2005 - May 21, 2005
Sue de Beer looks at morbid fantasies of horror culture, producing visual anthems about the darker side of youth. In her most recent series of video works, de Beer veers away from the horror movie format, instead juxtaposing icons of rebellious youth with tender moments of cautious lust. de Beer's work is neither voyeuristic nor exploitative. Rather, she offers insight into the struggle through the confusing and volatile years of adolescence and the loss of innocence. de Beer's teens, who once forced viewers to contemplate their potentially violent and horrific capabilities, now present the reverse by showing their delicate potential for love and intimacy.
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March 5, 2005 - April 9, 2005
Curated by Nu Nguyen
The works of Skyler Brickley, John White Cerasulo, Rachel Foullon and Adam Putnam will be exhibited as a celebratory exploration of slower times. Through painting, sculpture and video, these four artists have created worlds where time goes by unhurriedly and leisurely. Although the subjects, methods, and practices behind each of the artist's works are highly distinct and varied, their body of work as a whole calls a sense of stillness to mind. The easygoing and languid nature of all the work functions primarily on an emotional level, but also has an extremely precise, deliberate and cerebral quality. The slowness of the pieces can thus be read as a reaction to today's social, cultural and political instability. The works, however, are not at all nostalgic. There is not one single cry for a return to the past, nor a cry for a return to a simpler existence, to be found in the works. There is merely a common desire to find a more relaxed pace of life, a slower time.
Skyler Brickley's figures are in the midst of bombast, lovemaking, youth and death. Having experienced too much too soon, his characters find themselves in a state of deadened awareness, casually and callously indifferent to the world around them. Yet, at the same time, they cling onto a belief in the magic swell of romance and are forever in search of something so simple, yet so beautiful and perfect that the horrible past can be forgotten. As their world becomes more unsettled, the calm of familiar surroundings gains more meaning. Brickley paints basic, elementary situations that, in their tranquility, are the settings for a slow story. His avoidance of spectacle has resulted in a quiet body of work that lingers, rather than burns.
John White Cerasulo will present a series of watercolors featuring human characters caught in unlikely situations. His watercolors precariously skate the line between fact and fiction. At first glance, the drawings appear to be dreamy images from the past, but upon closer inspection, definite indications of contemporaneity emerge. For John White Cerasulo, the past does not represent something that was, but something that coexists with the present. As a result, his reality is a heavily layered experience - as much a product of his subjective and oftentimes forgiving memory of the past, as it is of his tender understanding of the present.
Rachel Foullon's most recent sculptures are large mound-like objects that resemble natural land formations of indeterminate scale. The mounds can be viewed either as miniature volcanoes and mountains, or as sizable rocks and boulders. Each sculpture is formed from layers of textured black papers that refer to cooled, hardened lava. Foullon also inserts allegorical objects, such as miniature homes, patio furniture and flowering plants, into these volcanic landscapes. It is as if Foullon's lava has slowed down time in order to preserve certain objects and bring them together into a shared space.
Adam Putnam will present a single-channel video, in which an empty room acts as the central focus of investigation. In this video, a vacant space, barely lit, quietly quivers and trembles. As time elapses, the emptiness slowly takes on a presence of its own, thus creating an eerie tension between a space that is, at once, familiar and entirely unknown.
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January 29, 2005 - February 26, 2005
Halloran's figurative paintings are inspired by thoughts of physics. Her subjects are female astronauts who exist in simple spaces and interact not so much with the environment, but with the various individual physical forces of gravity, light, movement and vibration. In Halloran's paintings, these invisible forces are made visual, becoming characters in and of themselves. Halloran manipulates these abstract physical forces and imposes them upon her subjects in order to expose the vulnerability of the human body. Her female astronauts willfully surrender to the forces that surround them, and it is through this conscious decision to concede that Halloran's subjects are able to strike a balance between the horrific and the beautiful.
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