Back, forth and round about
dal 18/2/2009 al 20/3/2009
Segnalato da
18/2/2009
Back, forth and round about
Thomas Erben Gallery, New York
Vijai Patchineelam, Sreshta Rit Premnath & Jaret Vadera. The exhibition presents a group of three artists who play with the poetics of relation, activating the spaces in between text, photography, painting, video, film and experience. In the project space: Rafil Kroll-Zaidi.
Vijai Patchineelam, Sreshta Rit Premnath & Jaret Vadera
Rafil Kroll-Zaidi project space
Thomas Erben is excited to present a group of three artists who play
with the poetics of relation, activating the spaces in between text,
photography, painting, video, film and experience. Parallels,
conundrums and paradoxes are the modus operandi used to illuminate
the layered processes of making sense. Texts and still or moving
images are partially erased, but then reappear in multiples,
accretions or other media and slip back and forth between potential
readings.
Vijai Patchineelam's (b. 1983, Rio de Janeiro) photographs and books
trap objects, processes and the producer in a perpetual state of
transit. Idea and result are conflated into a present continuous,
which is both the impetus behind and the product of the work. Arthur,
a large-scale photograph depicting the artist's friend, turned away,
bent forward beside a similarly figured painting, further confuses
these relations: the subject's body starts to resemble the body of
the painting and vice versa creating an oscillating and mutual
transformation.
2007 BA, Industrial Design, School of Fine Arts at the Federal
University of Rio de Janeiro. 2008 "Frame Series" Bombay Art Gallery,
Mumbai; "Zoation Painting" National Museum of Arts, La Paz, Bolivia;
"1st Collective" Bienal EBA/UFRJ, Rio de Janeiro; Resident Artist,
Blanton Museum of Arts, Austin, TX; 2007 IV International Biennial of
Bolivia, La Paz, where he was awarded the Premio Unión Latina.
Blue Book, Moon Rock by Sreshta Rit Premnath (b. 1979, Bangalore)
consists of four parts: a photograph, a chalkboard, a screenprint and
the light directed from a reeling projector onto silver-sprayed
acetate. The repeated image of a moon rock is recontextualized by
these shifting media. Man's romantic emotional attachment drew him to
the moon only to bring home physical evidence completely devoid of
the original impulse. Premnath is exactly interested in this gap
where the parts point in the same direction but hardly reconcile.
Juxtaposed with one image of the rock, Wittgenstein's quote from his
Blue Book, "We ought to talk further on about the meaning of
'forgetting the meaning of a word'" - a promise made in the past to
discuss the meaning of forgetting in the future - further enriches
Premnath's elliptical approach.
2008 Whitney Museum of Art Independent Study Program; 2006 MFA, Bard
College; 2003 BFA, The Cleveland Institute of Art; 2002 Fellow,
Yale-Norfolk Painting Residency, Yale University CT; 2008 "Mornings
in Mexico" book project, Guangzhou Biennial, China; "Black Box"
(solo) Gallery SKE, Bangalore; "Unnamable Name" Københavns
Hovedbibliotek, Copenhagen; 2007 "Spectral Evidence" Rotunda Gallery,
New York; 2006 "Yamini Nayar and Sreshta Premnath," Bose Pacia
Gallery, New York.
Jaret Vadera (b. 1976, Toronto) presents a fragmented, mixed media
"decollage" of an image from a tiger hunt. Simultaneously layering
and ripping through multiple levels of paint and paper, the artist
adorned and destroyed the symbol of the dead tiger, reflecting the
tension between the exotic and the real, fact and fiction. Similarly,
Vadera's video mutates found footage - omitting, fragmenting and
filtering data - revealing the space of transformation between
reality, mediation and the cognitive system.
2009 MFA Painting Candidate, Yale School of Art. 2008 "Exploding the
Lotus" Art & Culture Center of Hollywood, FL; 2006 "Everything All at
Once" Queens International, Queens Museum of Art, New York; 2005
"Night Shift" White Box, New York; 2005 "Fatal Love - South Asian
American Art Now" Queens Museum of Art.
In the project space, Rafil Kroll-Zaidi (b. 1980, New Delhi) exhibits
a selection of photographs of Bollywood film sets. The actors and
extras, relaxed and out of character between shots, and the laborers,
suddenly highly visible, contrast with the hyper-artificiality of the
sets, allowing the images to explore the construction of the
industry's vernacular. The artist also cites his longstanding
interest in approaching light as a central narrative feature. In
essence, the light source becomes like a character, whose primacy and
subtle strangeness fundamentally change the emotional tone of the
still image, transforming familiar and even clichéd stories into
ambiguous, unknowable ones.
2003 BA, Princeton University. 2008 "Click: Contemporary Photography
in India" Vadehra Gallery, New Delhi and Grosvenor Gallery, London;
2006 "Hot Shot, Spring" Jen Bekman Gallery, New York; his
photo-graphs were included in "India Now" Editions Textuel, Paris,
2007, and Thames & Hudson, London, 2008.
Opening: Thursday, February 19, 6-8:30 pm
Thomas Erben Gallery
516 West 20th Street - New York
Gallery hours: Tuesday - Saturday, 10-6
Free admission