calendario eventi  :: 

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12/12/2003

Lucas Ajemian and Debra Hampton

Priska C. Juschka Fine Art - Old location, New York

Opening reception: Saturday, December 13, 7-10 PM


Lucas Ajemian
"How You Know It"
December 13, 2003 - January 19, 2004

The work of Lucas Ajemian is an ongoing examination of systems and identities, often dealing with issues of nationality and the relationship between human beings and society. Through a range mediums, he is able to explore these constructs while presenting ephemeral concerns in a highly tactile manner, that is, relating to a sense of time and space in a way that seems familiar to the viewer. For his first New York solo show, Ajemian's compulsory activity of determining his greater surroundings through shifting perceptual states, from familiarity to absurd disassociations, attempts to draw emphasis away from what people know to how they know it in manner and intention.

In a new group of drawings,figures in the landscape move through turnstiles and revolving doors in their discreet pursuits along the terrain.The breadth of geographies and activities represented together with such repetitive interventions onto the landscape suggests a looming authoritarian presence. Tourists, models, soldiers, and others seem willfully trapped by their own movements within the rendered borders that surround them.

Maximizing both sculptural and painterly elements of video, the architectural void in The Annex 2001, is traversed via a first-person perspective while the cameras lens captures the planes and apertures at varying degrees of disappearance. Construction workers are passed along the way as they continually build and maintain the interior of the blown-out space.

Priska C Juschka Fine Art presents Lucas Ajemian's first solo New York exhibition; How You Know It. His work has recently been seen in a group show at the Prague Biennial, Czech Rpublic, the project room at Artists Space, New york, and 25hours Video Festival in Barcelona, Spain.

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Debra Hampton

"Streamline"
In the Project Room
December 13, 2003 - January 19, 2004

This work by Debra Hampton represents an immersive world the artist explores through patterns of chaos, chance, and order. A meditative and minimalist journey into the nuances, subtleties, and extremes of random intersections, these abstract drip paintings reify the media in a series of overlapping accidents, pushed and pulled by forces of gravity and air.

Avoiding forced narrative and the artist's willful intent allows the medium to meet the artist's hand in a unique collaboration, the existence of which becomes reason to pay attention to the spaces between, a pattern of accidents that might seem to reveal nothing and go nowhere. In the sciences, such "accidents" have served as catalysts for great discoveries.

To legitimize such accidents and serendipitous events, the artist makes a statement about the nature of man and his or her environment. This series is about taking refuge from regulated and formulaic structure in order to recognize the natural flow and will of the medium. Serendipity may thus offer a glimpse at that which exists yet has gone unnoticed or unattended.

The process begins with dropping watercolor or ink on a surface. The paint is then blown, dripped, and run over this surface. It's forced to move, and under pressure it grows and then fades away or connects with another stream coming from the opposite direction. Each shape is then carefully outlined to intimately delineate and reinforce its uniqueness, its idiosyncratic turnings or its abrupt end. In some works small blossoms are drawn in the curves, placed on mini plateaus or hang on to the end of a drip. In the enamel paintings the original drawing on paper is traced and then redrawn and painted on a new vehicle creating greater abstraction.

The result is an energetic mass, growing, organic forms that cannot be clearly identified yet seem familiar. Like a networked root system or a fantastic cosmic explosion, the young blossom play and pull at the sinewy chaos. The flora seems to grow out of the forms or multiply on them like a virus. A metaphor for the blueprint of life, delicate yet explosive and uncontrollable.

For her exhibition in the Project Room at Priska Juschka Fine Art, Hampton uses the walls as her surface, drawing explosive and streaming forms that take over the space. Accompanying the wall drawing will be are works on paper and paintings.

The gallery is now open Wednesday through Monday 12 - 6 pm or by appointment.

Image: Debra Hampton, 'Enamel'

Priska Juschka
97 North 9th Street, (Berry Street & Wythe Ave.) Brooklyn, NY 11211
T: 718 782-4100 F: 718 782-4800

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