NEAR DARK
Present Company
Brooklyn, NY
FEB 13 – MAR 15, 2015
NEAR DARK is a tenor-driven exhibition as well as a visual effect, reflecting an interest in the fractured image by way of noir aesthetics. Through painting, collage, photography and sculpture, the works on view underscore the depreciating value of commoditized goods, the dismantling of the figure and the precariousness of constructed ephemeral spaces. The show’s title also brackets the saturation of image culture on one extreme and a responsive, counter-position of image sampling at the other. As this visual information overlaps, the results are cinematic arenas where modernist forms grapple with the figure or scene.
In Cooper Holoweski’s recent mixed-media paintings, iconic mid-century furniture becomes the skeletal structures for ritual altars. Utopian design and its almost atheist posture are trumped as its intrinsic value pivots from something you use to something you meditate upon. Jen Schwarting’s ongoing series, Drunk Girls, typifies the dark friction between the figure and form. Her sculptural objects, which combine painting, textiles and collage, position found imagery of various women in states of unconsciousness as they are compositionally held up by forms normally associated with male-driven abstraction.
Raum Bilder, which means Space Images in German, is a body of work by Ginevra Shay that takes collected images from advertising and printed media through a series of alterations. These image samples become architectural objects in order to create studio installations influenced by constructivism and futurism. Each new spatial composition is then re-photographed with lenses that flatten the depth of field in order to revert the viewer back to the two-dimensional photographic plane with disconcerting effects.
