Three Exhibitions
dal 17/10/2007 al 23/11/2007
Segnalato da
17/10/2007
Three Exhibitions
Casey Kaplan Gallery, New York
Sarah Dornner presents a single sculpture along with a new photograph in Gallery I. Garth Weiser presents five large-scale acrylic and oil paintings in Gallery II. Davis Rhodes, presents an installation of spray painted canvases and over-sized foam-core panels in Gallery III.
Sarah Dornner, Garth Weiser, and Davis Rhodes. Solo Show.
Casey Kaplan is pleased to announce the first solo exhibition of artist, Sarah Dornner. By appropriating
technologies of representation from the sciences, architecture, and the commercial arts and combining
the dimensional properties of video, photography, sculpture, and drawing, Sarah Dornner investigates
the ways in which cultural and social constructs inform individual perceptions of space. This exhibition
will show two artworks in Gallery I, Catwalk a white, spiral staircase and Hedge, a graphic photograph of
a shrub.
Dominating in scale, Catwalk is determined by a mathematical equation. Each unattainable step is 10%
smaller than the one that came before it, creating a spiral that continues to infinity. Dornner views this
abstraction in cinematic terms through films such as Ziegfeld Girl, 1941 – the spiral staircase from the
set is an inspiration for this piece. In Ziegfeld Girl, the Busby Berkeley musical segments break the rules
of continuity and result in an impossible space. Viewers are presented with interspersed voids and
camera angles that compress the characters into graphic forms. Dornner’s Catwalk distorts perception
in a similar way, forcing a dreamlike perspective with infinite space onto a real, architectural structure.
Opposing the monochromatic staircase is the photograph Hedge. The plant depicted is a privet, used
mainly for privacy hedging and commonly found in suburban yards. Dornner implements a technique
that heightens the gradation of color and creates a mysterious, never-ending abyss. The result is an inert
simulacrum of the once organic form.
In the juxtaposition, Dornner contrasts the two artworks dimensionality and the unrevealing, domestic
language of the shrub with the fantastic space of the sculpture. Central to her practice, Catwalk and
Hedge are analytic abstractions that confound spatial logic.
Sarah Dornner is a recent Master of Fine Arts graduate from Yale University School of Art.
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Casey Kaplan is pleased to announce the second solo exhibition in New York of artist, Garth Weiser.
In a practice that hovers between the disparate formal languages of abstraction, minimalism and
figuration, Weiser’s paintings are at once figures in space and flat abstractions. This paradox interrupts
the logic that painting is a fixed image. Weiser’s new series will present five of his latest large-scale oil
and acrylic paintings in Gallery II.
Until recently, Weiser used maquettes as the source for his paintings. He now draws on his memory
of these three-Dimensional forms to create small, quick sketches and collages. These studies crossreference
images central to his iconography, including artworks and design objects from the 1980s and
1990s. Expanding on these illusions and recycled visual cues, the under drawings on canvas act as
skeletons to the tape, acrylic, oil and enamel that follow.
Weiser’s paintings employ a mélange of color wheels, gradations and value scales using expressive
techniques to create luscious surfaces of contrasting colors and finishes. Uniform circles fluctuate
between breasts, eyes, and cavities in geometric compositions that evoke colossal heads and torsos.
The undulation of palette and surface treatment combines textural, ceramic qualities with faceted
illusions of space. All entitled Nude (#1, 2, 3…), the paintings use this collective language to inform
one another. In a sequential array, the five nudes stage an ephemeral interplay of both subject and context. Throughpattern, line, shape, and color, Weiser’s rich textured, platonic paintings re-invent the picture plane witha new space.
Garth Weiser received a Master of Fine Arts from Columbia University School of the Arts in 2005 and has
had previous solo exhibitions at Guild & Greyshkul, New York and Kavi Gupta gallery, Chicago. In 2007
he participated in “Blackberrying,” at Christina Wilson, Copenhagen and “Destroy Athens,” The Athens
Biennial, Greece. Other group exhibitions include, “Greater New York,” at PS1 MOMA, New York and
“Hunch and Flail,” curated by Amy Silman at Artists Space, New York.
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Casey Kaplan is pleased to present the first exhibition in New York of artist, Davis Rhodes. Through a
single medium – vitreous enamel spray paint – on rectangular canvases and free standing or wallmounted
foam-core boards, Rhodes will present an installation of paintings in Gallery III.
Making use of single colors and strong forms, Rhodes has found a new way to harness the potential of
Color Field and Hard-edge painting. At the same time the works mine the abstraction of the
contemporary street. Forms that are ubiquitous and found on sign posts, deli awnings, billboards, hiphop
posters, banners, cigarette packs, fitted caps, and asphalt, are quickly translated into colors such
as taxicab yellow, Marlboro red and patent-leather black, and traversed with geometric shapes, lines,
blurs, and significant digits. Smooth and shiny, the surfaces would be homogenous if not for the
remnants of a night out in the street, cigarette ash, or a drip that escaped the speed of execution. Just
when the narcissistic facades become a unique and remote urban skin, a reductive swipe acknowledges
the artist’s hand.
“Yellow Number 1, Jefferson Street, 9.3.07,” is a freestanding foam-core work. Warped and bending yet
evoking a sculptural monolith, it depicts a clean, white number one on a yellow ground. Vulnerable in its
medium and stability, it functioned outside on Jefferson street in Bushwick for days as a chameleon in its
surroundings only to disappear and emerge weeks later in the gutter with a history now all its own.
Representing ‘one dollar’ and ‘#1’ from an array of urban references, the figure is a singular example of
repeated signs in Rhodes’ paintings.
Davis Rhodes’ keen interest in abstraction as a de-contextualized intensity that runs through visual
culture has led him to explore the relationships between painting and print media, and a studio practice
and public performance. Through form, framework, context and materials, Rhodes’ paintings succinctly
blur boundaries between the inside and outside of a painting practice.
Davis Rhodes is a recent Master of Fine Arts graduate from Columbia University School of the Arts.
Image by sarah Dornner
Opening 18 october 2007
Casey Kaplan Gallery
525 West 21 St Street, New York
Free Admission