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26/6/2003

Phantom Arch

White Columns, New York

Curated by Chris Perez/Ratio 3 Phantom Arch brings together works by five artists whose artwork subtly reflects on ideas of architecture, memory, and unseen forces.

Ben Peterson (San Francisco) creates detailed drawings that examine the permeability of structures and ghostly phenomena. His newest work directly refers to quickly built master- planned communities and the way they legislate how one can modify their home. The diagrammatical works illustrate house-like structures that are drawn in a state of flux, as if falling apart and coming together at the same time. These drawings consider the results of what happens to a space when it is abandoned as quickly as it is built.

Working entirely from memory, Evrim Kavcar Temir (Istanbul) makes small clay sculptures of homes and their interiors that she has inhabited. She begins by digging into wet clay, creating shapes with just enough detail to mine the memories of these past places. Intentionally appearing unfinished, Kavcar Temir's sculptures look as if they had just been excavated from both the ground and the artist's cloudy recollection. Clay, like the mind, is very malleable, and the artist views these works as a way of digging into the ruins of her own memory.

Elizabeth Saveri (Los Angeles) makes small yet richly detailed oil paintings on wood. When installed, the paintings create a sprawling constellation of empty rooms, roads, and still-lifes. They function as a record of the artist's daily movements as she navigates through interiors and journeys by car to various destinations in Los Angeles. Incorporating the language of film and photography, Saveri's installations construct a non-linear narrative sequence that is interspersed with close-ups, tilt-ups and pan-shots to suggest the artist's movement through these spaces and also her mental wanderings.

Mark Shetabi (Philadelphia) creates installations that investigate the boundary between public and private spaces. Shetabi's constructed environments are located behind the walls of anonymous square rooms. In order to experience the work, the viewer must approach a door and look through a peephole. The Palace at 4 AM is a reconstruction of Shetabi's childhod home in Teheran, Iran, built entirely from memory. By utilizing the peephole, Shetabi simultaneously creates a sense of intimacy and distance between the viewer and the artwork. Shetabi's focus on the interaction between the viewer, architecture, and artwork taps into feelings of transience and dislocation.

Conor McGrady's (New York) work examines encounters with violence, ideological conflict, and low-intensity war, based on first-hand experiences and oral histories. Originally from Northern Ireland, McGrady explores the impact of the British Army's control on domestic and public spaces in that region. His drawings depict empty buildings and housing schemes, which in most cases were designed and planned by military technicians to ensure containment of an insurgent population. Often subject to repeated invasions, search procedures and constant surveillance, a latent residue of fear and disquiet resides in these seemingly innocuous buildings and spaces.

About the curator: Chris Perez is the owner/director of Ratio 3, an access point for contemporary art based in San Francisco. His most recent actions include: Thee Magick Boxx (New York City) and Taqueria Cancun: The San Francisco Hook-up (Boston). Perez previously worked as the curatorial assistant for contemporary art at the Whitney Museum of American Art, helping organize Bitstreams and the 2002 Biennial Exhibition. Prior to that, he worked at the CCAC Wattis Institute in San Francisco.

WHITE ROOMS (solo exhibitions for artists unaffiliated with a New York gallery):

Douglas Melini presents a painting entitled Colossus, composed of thousands of hard-edged horizontal and vertical bands varying in width and color. Touching on various traditions of geometric abstraction, Melini's work is reminiscent of artists such as Sol LeWitt, Joseph Albers and Frank Stella.
Filling the entire room, Colossus is the result of three years of production for the artist. While Melini considers the piece to be a single painting, it is comprised of separate panels, designed to be arranged in different configurations to adapt to the space in which it is hung. The edges of the panels are painted so that they cast a halo of color into the spaces that divide them. In this manner, Colossus addresses not only customary formal concerns (color, light, surface, etc.), but responds directly to the architecture which it occupies.
The installation at White Columns will present ten of the thirteen total panels in the painting. Melini holds a MFA from the California Institute of the Arts and a BFA from the University of Maryland. He has had solo exhibitions at The Rocket Gallery, London and Richard Heller Gallery, Santa Monica. This is his first solo show in New York.

Referring to multiple traditions in painting, Steven Baines's oil paintings present small, discrete scenes against bold, geometric grounds. Presenting such delicate items as a candle flame, soap bubbles and small birds, the settings in the center of each composition refer to the fleeting and ephemeral, carrying on the convention of Momento Mori messages in seventeenth century still-life work.
Yet the placement of these scenes against modernist color field and Op-Art style grounds gives the work a more contemporary feel. The use of tiny glass beads over oil paint gives areas of the canvas a reflective, shimmering surface. Baines has a BFA from the School of Visual Arts, NY. He has exhibited his work at Brooklyn Fire Proof, Urban Etc., and Pat Hearn Gallery. This is his first solo show.

white columns
320 west 13th street
[entrance on horatio street between 8th avenue and hudson street]
new york, ny 10014
tel 212.924.4212
fax 212.645.4764

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