25/6/2008
Masato Nagai and Patrizia Novello
HSF, New York
The (Art of) Dissemblance. A reflection on the use and perception of objects, paintings, printings, and photographs, and on their repetition, combination, appropriation, and counterfeit in relation to art practices.
HSF is glad to present The (Art of) Dissemblance, an exhibition featuring works by artists-in-residence Masato Nagai (Japanese, etching, silkscreen, photocopy) and Patrizia Novello (Italian, painting). Curated by Raffaele Bedarida, the show displays projects realized by HSF fellows during their stay in New York (April-July, 2008).
According to the New Oxford American Dictionary, to dissemble means to conceal one's true motives, feelings, or beliefs. To assemble is the act of fitting together the separate component parts of an object. The (Art of) Dissemblance is a diptych, a double reflection on the use and perception of objects, paintings, printings, and photographs, and on their repetition, combination, appropriation, and counterfeit in relation to art practices, strategies, and identities now, half a century after the 1961 MoMA landmark show, The Art of Assemblage.
In the hybrid work Landscape from Her, the calendar scheme of Patrizia Novello’s three month sojourn at HSF is reproduced on the wall through 90 fake Polaroids. These are actually fragments of a generic, extremely simple landscape painting by the artist herself: cut into Polaroid-sized almost monochrome pieces, each framed by white painting and rearranged in a different order, the landscape is dismantled and turned into a personal journal. The landscape/diary is completed by three large canvases that simulate typewritten notebook pages. In the era of the digital disembodiment, the artist reflects, by means of painting, on the objecthood of both photographic images and written words. Novello deconstructs and questions the accepted boundaries in art practices between genres (landscape, diary), media (photography, painting, installation, object, text), and strategies (conceptual, emotional, industrial, handicraft, minimal, painterly).
Masato Nagai has combined black and white images in World Tour (2007-2008), a huge wall piece. Photocopies of photographs shot by the artist in Melbourne (Australia), Kochi (Japan), and New York are alternated with silkscreen reproductions of photocopied details from Nagai’s own etchings, and with photocopies from books, catalogues, and posters. Auto-biographical visual notes from the artist’s experiences (in his homeland, during his stay at the Australian residency program Wardlow Project, and at HSF) coexist with fragments from his work and the outside iconosphere in a monumental surface, which swarms with interlocked figures, landscapes, and texts. If on the one hand, images that are extracted from their contexts as isolated Xerox copies are reintroduced here in a fluid cognitive/memory dimension, on the other hand they are reduced to a changing interrelationship of blacks and whites against the regular grid of the photocopy pages. (RB, June 2008)
The (Art of) Dissemblance
Opening reception: June 26, 2008, 6:00-10:00 pm
On view by appointment: June 27-July 6, 2008
HSF
128 W 121 Street - New York