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9/12/2014

Tactility and Texture

Lower East Side Printshop, New York

curated by Benjamin Sutton Lower East Side Printshop is pleased to present Tactility and Texture guest curated by Hyperallergic’s Metro Editor Benjamin Sutton.

This exhibition’s doubled title is intended as an acknowledgment of the obvious: the artists included seem to belong in two separate exhibitions. One would be a two-artist show featuring the funny, melancholic, and palpably hairy figures populating Xinyi Cheng’s works alongside Ivan Forde’s surreal, irreverent, and irresistible mashups. The other would feature three artists - Shadi Harouni, Ali Medina, and Sarah Smith - whose approaches to abstraction highlight the play of layers and textures in their work. But the juxtaposition of these two seemingly disparate sets of works should also underline their formal connections. Namely, all five artists draw viewers into their work with the vivid and evocative textures they create.

The sparing but incredibly effective use of color and line in Xinyi Cheng’s work immediately pulls us into the funny, tender, and awkward scenes she depicts. She conjures incredibly evocative surfaces, settings, and situations with subtle means. Ivan Forde, on the other hand, marshals seemingly familiar images and textures to destabilize viewers, placing them in vibrant and strange landscapes. Shadi Harouni takes a similar tack, decontextualizing everyday symbols and patterns to create new and alluring abstract images. Ali Medina compounds the hybrid imagery in her explosive abstract works with multifarious textures — her lightweight and luminescent pieces mark each shift in color and surface with literal cuts in the paper. Sarah Smith bridges the exhibition’s abstract and figurative camps with non-figurative works that so convincingly portray common and everyday textures like dust and water that they could just as credibly be labeled photorealistic.

Whether they do so to better evoke the temperatures and surfaces of a given space, or to heighten our awareness of everyday patterns and patinas, these five artists all heighten the impact of their prints by appealing to viewers’ sense of touch.

Image: Xinyi Cheng, on the way to the beach, 2014, etching, 12“ x 18” image, 15“ x 22” sheet, edition of 20

Press Contact:
Christine Walia, christine@printshop.org

Opening: Wednesday, December 10, from 6 – 8pm

Lower East Side Printshop
306 West 37th Street, 6th Floor
Hours: Weekdays from 10am – 6pm, and weekends from 12 - 6pm
Free and open to the public

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