Beyond Process
October 22 – November 14, 2009
Renwick Gallery is pleased to announce the group show "Beyond Process". The exhibition will feature nine artists, eight of whom are unrepresented in New York. Artists include Lucas Ajemian, Patterson Beckwith, Phil Chang, Samara Golden, Alexander Hoda, George Kontos, Jason Kraus, Megan Marrin, and Lisa Williamson.
In process art, the actions taken to create an image are more important than the resulting object. This show explores the artist's path from idea to final product while seeking to reach beyond these parameters. Each artwork in the exhibition results from unique, elaborate, or subtle actions. While the work is process oriented, utilizing the concepts and methods of process art (rite, ritual, and performance/improv, non-traditional materials), the work moves beyond process art because the final product does not point directly to how the work is assembled, nor is it the subject of the resulting object. Yet process does play an essential role, it is central to the meaning of the resulting piece. Concealment of a fetishized process reveals an object emblematic of the artist's process.
In "Untitled Film 2008", Lucas Ajemian re-engages a set of drawings, "Turnstile Drawings', that had accumulated over the past four years without the intention to use them for another purpose. A year ago Ajemian assembled the succession of images into a 16mm film. Lucas Ajemian lives and works in New York.
Patterson Beckwith's "Untitled (Penetrative seeing by means of X-rays: radiography)" is part of a larger series called Bananas for Maholy, an eleven-part photographic series from 2006, which takes quite literally as an instructional model Laszlo Moholy-Nagy's definitions of photographic depiction, the cheeky indebtedness to "konkret kunst" by way of institutional critique (Moholy's grandson was Beckwith's gallerist at the time the series was produced) is but one point of departure for a project that self-consciously exists in the confounding wake of the Exploding Plastic Inevitable and the Pictures Generation. Patterson Beckwith lives and works in New York.
Phil Chang includes four "Untitled" photographs displayed under silk cloth. The photographs depict Navy personnel and a single landscape taken by the naturalist and wildlife photographer Donald R. Dickey (1187-1932), in the early 20th century during an expedition to the Laysan Islands in Hawaii. The photographs are made by contact prints from Dickey's archive of glass negatives using expired photographic paper that dates to approximately 1993. The photographic paper has not been subjected to darkroom chemistry resulting in an unstable photographic image. The image itself is exposed to available light each time the viewer unveils the cloth to view the photograph. Since the photographs are subjected to a process of exposure each time the cloth is lifted, the work addresses the instability of images, historic military campaigns, and questions regarding the value of an artwork whose obsolescence is a built-in attribute. Phil Chang lives and works in Los Angeles.
Samara Golden's sculpture, "You're so dumb, you're favorite color is clear", is constructed from photos culled from the Internet, mirrors and live video. The work engages in an ongoing self-reflective and self-conscious act of self re-appropriation, and by doing so comments on the conditions of ambivalence, confusion and self-recognition in the post-Internet age. This mise en abyme (or a picture within a picture) becomes further complicated by a series of texts activated as reflections in the sculpture through a process involving live video. In asserting this inherent 'complexity' Golden's sculptures seek to question personal belief systems, self delusion, and anxiety. Illusion is used to set up a scenario in which "confusion" is the foundation. By using combinations of technology and traditional art processes, Golden's recent projects take up the position of asking the viewer to enter into a reciprocal relationship with the sculpture. Samara Golden lives and works in Los Angeles.
Alexander Hoda's "Gobstoppers" are a pair of ceramic dogs, similar to ones that Hoda would see as a child at his grandmother's house. It is typical for English houses have a pair of Stafordshire dogs above the fireplace. Here, Hoda references the Martin Brothers, a pair of brothers that worked at the end of the 19th Century in England. The dogs were cast and then assembled with various other items attached to the bodies. The glazes on top are a way to move the work into color but keep the action of pouring and melting feel to the work. Alexander Hoda lives and works in London.
"Adventures Are Dead My Dears" and "Secret Room" are Kontos's original prints, the results of a process of printing, scanning, painting over, erasing and exposing to chemicals, which distort and remove parts of the printed surface. The partially destroyed prints are then photographed and thus appear as relics of a destroyed archive. In this work there is a created fiction around an idea for a film piece that never reaches completion. Instead, the concept for the film itself (location studies, set designs, studies, subtitles, etc..) is the subject matter that eventually gets destroyed, and then monumentalized in the means of photography as the final stage. George Kontos lives and works in Los Angeles.
In the explosions series, Jason Kraus uses the objects to mark moments in time, which happened in a private performance. The "Primary Explosion" photographs are meant to mark the actual moment. The photograph actually allows Kraus to show something one can't see for it happens to quick for the eye to notice it. The images in the primary explosion photos are both digitally manipulated and not at the same time forcing the viewer to try and decide what in the work is found and fabricated. The "rags" mark the aftermath they are quite simply the remnants of what happened to the room as they are simply the sheets of drop cloth which were draped around the space that the performance. Each object is a marker to one moment of the performance but together they attempt to tell the whole story. The work plays off the viewers ability to suspend there disbelief, forcing the viewer to look at all things as both found a fabricated, subdued and spectacle, mediated and raw. Kraus wants the viewer to ask if the image is real or fake or if it even matters at all. Jason Kraus lives and works in Los Angeles and New York.
Megan Marrin's diptych of black and white photographs is based on a Triptych of Marilyn Monroe from the 50's, standing in a black bathing suit. The image is a frequently reproduced, overly commercialized image of the actress shot in a studio. The piece for the show has duplicated the original image of Monroe, using the artist in her place, shot in her studio. The original photograph is glamorous, as was the intent of any Monroe photo, or numerous photos of celebrities or models, which have a "capacity for achieving impressive effects by the most superficial means,"(Muriel Spark, The Public Image). But these public images have intent beyond the face (omitted in the re-shot image), and beyond what signifies sex (bathing suit, high heels). This intent was extracted from the original, re-shot, and refigured. This new work is a continuation of a portraiture project the artist has explored for the past several years, revised now to include casting herself in the role of other photographic images. Megan Marrin lives and works in New York.
In her series "Pallet Cleansers", Lisa Williamson's tapestries function as very base sketches. The artist begins with the most low, repetitive and common forms as means for development - a way of pushing forward and clearing one's head. The material, color combinations and formal arrangements within each work provide an entry point into thinking and making. In some respects these works describe an economy of making - a generative, almost meditative attempt to work through the studio. In focusing on something physical or material, room remains open for more cerebral, tangential 'work'. Lisa Williamson lives and works in Los Angeles.
For more information, please contact the gallery by calling 212-609-3535 or email info@renwickgallery.com.