CONTEMPORARY ART DAILY

What can we say of art that leaves no trace? 

That its existence is purported, its absence assured?

Since 1997, Otis Houston, Jr., aka  Black Cherokee, has made art on the Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive at 125th Street. Using his body as his primary medium for performance, and working at such a congested crossroads he has found the largest audience for any artist, in some sense larger than the daily droves of all New York City’s museums combined. 

Though known to many, he remains unknown to most.

Dozens of YouTube videos with thousands of views later, a profile in The New York Times, and a like on Instagram from the art dealer Gavin Brown, this exhibition at ROOM EAST marks the artist’s gallery debut. Like Jiri Kovanda’s undocumented performances on the streets of Prague in the 1970s, or the peripatetic actions of Fluxus, his peers in performance include Acconci, Burden, Oppenheim, Schneemann, among others. His use of text recalls the blunt force of Kruger, the poetics of Holzer, or at times the bald irony of Ruscha. His sculptures  have a similar improvisatory nature of the found object assemblage of Jimmie Durham. 

Houston started making collages after taking an art class during his incarceration 1984-1990. The works in the present exhibition were selected from the 1980s and 90s, a highly charged era, during which the tumult of political and corporate powers were channelled through the print media of the time, and consumerism was all ugly sweaters, and padded shoulders. These collages are but a fraction of the work that he has made, and yet they represent the bulk of what is preserved of his artistic output.

In some respects Houston’s collages are the progeny of the diametric cultural polarities discussed in Kirk Varnedoe’s “High and Low” exhibition at MoMA in 1990. Since the era bookended by the Rodney King riots in Los Angeles in 1992, and the shooting of Amadou Diallo in New York 1999, race and society remain hot button issues, kindling for the resurgent conservative forces of the America that birthed a new mainstream of mistrust.

Otis Houston, Jr. (born 1964 in Greenville, S.C.) lives and works in New York City.

CHECKLIST

CONTEMPORARY ART DAILY

NEW YORK ART QUARTERLY

BLOUIN ART INFO

A certain appetite of the mind can, then, find more nourishment in the label on the can than in its contents: a poetic, if wayward feast.

If that appetite came with photography, and grew in film, it has not found its limit; rather it seeks it in a metapraxis of observation, analysis,             production.

– Hollis Frampton

ROOM EAST is delighted to present a second exhibition of works by Hollis Frampton that will focus on the the largest presentation to date of xerographs from the series By Any Other Name 1979-1983. The two-floor exhibition will consist of the upper floor dedicated to xerographic works, and the lower floor to a projection of two seminal short films Lemon 1969 and Carrots and Peas 1969 on continuous loop. The exhibition will be on public view Thursday – Sunday 12pm-6pm for the duration of the exhibition, and by appointment. This year marks the 80th anniversary of Frampton’s birth.

view press release

MOUSSE

KALEIDOSCOPE

Dario Guccio cuts silhouettes of human bodies and outlines of quotidian objects out of papers, faux skins and cardboards. He layers the cutouts and, by sewing or nailing them together, creates complex compositions in which single figures and forms are overlapped and interwoven. Through this process the artist offsets the flatness of his picture planes, much like the set designs of shadow-puppet theatre.

The exhibition comprises of a series of identically shaped oval works made of cardboard cutouts affixed to wooden panels. Nocturnal deities, pregnant women, plants, jars and the artist himself gather in whimsical tableaux, onto which a multitude of hammered nails recall the night sky. In two of the paintings, cutouts of the artist’s own profile are connected to mechanisms that rotate languidly.

Guccio belongs to a young generation of Italian artists who have turned to historically-loaded visual references in reaction to the languages of new media. The immediacy of his historical references is manifested, for example, in his use of imagery codified by Novecento Italiano (the artistic movement that translated the rappel a l’ordre heralded by Fascism); or his deconstruction of the picture plane and use of a bold color palette, both of which recall the spatialist investigations of Lucio Fontana, Agostino Bonalumi and Paolo Scheggi, among others. Guccio finds in these references a positive value at the same time that he sees them as props in the theatre of Italianness.

Precedents to Guccio’s new works can indeed be found in Fontana’s Concetto Spaziale (Teatrino) as well as Pino Pascali’s Teatrino, both created in 1964. Guccio’s nail constellations hint at the cosmic and cosmonautical imagery of the former, while his stylized figures recall the bric-a-brac object-characters of the latter. However, Guccio’s approach to narrative, visual layering and scenic design ultimately align him most with Pascali, whose fictions exploited national cultural signifiers to oppose the absolutes of Italian modernism.

While casting himself as the protagonist of his own stage, Guccio extends the concept of Italianness to a point of no return.

    – Michele D’Aurizio

DARIO GUCCIO (b. 1988, Italy) is reinvigorating the aesthetics of both zero and dada. He’s recently had solo exhibitions at Federico Vavassori, Milan, IT; ReMap4, Athens, GR; and Gasconade, Milan, IT. His work has been exhibited at at Balice Hertling, New York; lm3, Geneva, CH; Room East, New York; and a group show curated by Robert Stadler and Alexis Vaillant at Galerie Poire, Nancy, FR. His solo exhibition at Federico Vavassori was reviewed in Artforum (January 2015) and featured in Vogue Italia. Guccio lives and works in Milan. This is his first solo exhibition in New York.

For downloadable press material, click here.

Why is it so difficult to measure, with any precision, the mediating role of techniques? Because the action that we are trying to measure is subject to blackboxing, a process that makes the joint production of actors and artifacts entirely opaque. Daedalus’s maze shrouds itself in secrecy. Can we open the labyrinth and count what is inside?

– Bruno Latour, Pandora’s Hope. Harvard, 1999

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Sunday 15 November 12-2pm

GLORIA, 1979
SURFACE TENSION, 1968
NOSTALGIA, 1971
APPARATUS SUM, 1972

Each of the films were shown on its original 16mm format, on new preservation prints, which were preserved by Anthology Film Archives. The program was introduced by film historian P. Adams Sitney. A transcript of his introductions can be found here.

ANTHOLOGY FILM ARCHIVES
32 2nd Avenue
New York, NY 10002

ARTNEWS

ARTSY

ARTSPACE

Paris Internationale
October 20–24, 2015
45, avenue d’Iéna
75116 Paris, France

ELEPHANT

SUNDAY
14-19 October, 2015
VIP Preview Wednesday 14 October 12-6pm
Ambika P3, University of Westminster, 35 Marlyebone Road, London, NW1 5LS

There is a wonderfully vulgar Jewish joke about a Polish- Jewish wife, tired after a hard day’s work; when her husband
comes home, also tired, but horny, he tells her: “I cannot make love to you now, but I need a release — can you suck me
and swallow my sperm? That would help me a lot!”The wife relies: “I am too tired to do that now darling — why don’t you just masturbate into a glass, and I will drink it in the morning!”

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THE NEW YORK TIMES

ARTFORUM

MOUSSE

My Darling,

Though you are far away from me, nothing will change. I will love you truly and you will always be a special part of Fatebe. 

I long to feel the comfort and softness of your loving arms. I want to hug you and kiss Fatebe and hold you tight but I must wait…

Until we meet again, I long for Fatebe.

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CONTEMPORARY ART DAILY

MOUSSE

ROBIN CAMERON / JOSEPH CORNELL / LAEH GLENN / DARIO GUCCIO / DAVID KORTY / DANA LOK / GEORGE HENRY LONGLY / BENOÎT MAIRE / JULIA WACHTEL / B. WURTZ

“…the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.”

– F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack-Up, 1936

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CONTEMPORARY ART DAILY

DAILYSERVING

P   = Probability of Accident

B   = Burden of Precautions

L   = Gravity of Loss

c.  = Economically Efficient Outcome: minimum expense for precautions that carries an acceptable level of risk.

A logical calculus governs the space of accident. A variable built into the mismatching between layers––the chemical-biological, the infrastructural-architectural, the legal-financial.

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HYPERALLERGIC

NADA NEW YORK
14-17 MAY 2015
Pier 36, Basketball City
299 South Street
New York, NY 10002

MiArt
10-12 April 2015
fieramilanocity
Viale Scarampo, Pad.3, Gate 5
20149 Milan, Italy

MOUSSE

THE BALTIMORE SUN

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Thursday 5 March 6-9pm @ A+E STUDIOS, 160 West Broadway, New York, NY 10013

ROOM EAST is pleased to announce a special, week-long installation by Sebastian Lloyd Rees, “Numberless crowded streets, high growth of iron, slender, strong, light, splendidly uprising towards clear skies.”

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Overpopulation, inequality and sustainability are just a few of the topics the art of Sebastian Lloyd Rees addresses.His work is built upon a regimen of field studies, travel, and his own research into the silk routes of modern life. Sourcing material from street vendors to the internet, Rees creates found-object assemblages, composed from things he encounters on his daily explorations. Often the objects that Rees picks up and their subsequent repurposing puzzle together interlinked networks of design, production, use, reuse, and disposal, whether it be a discarded cardboard box found on a sidewalk, or

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THE NEW YORKER

THE BROOKLYN RAIL

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MOUSSE

Room East is pleased to present a two-person exhibition by David Andrew Tasman and G. William Webb, which takes as its subject the state of materiality in a rapidly dematerializing world

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VULTURE

ARTISSIMA

OFF-WHITE

ART FORUM

FORCE-n-1. The capacity to work or cause physical change; energy, strength, or active power. 2. The transfer of inherent energy. Any interaction which tends to change the motion of an object. 3. Power made operative against resistance. 4. A person or group capable of influential action.

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NEW YORK MAGAZINE

ARTINFO

MODERN PAINTERS

ARTNET

ARTILLERY

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WHITEWALL

Perhaps you are familiar with the term normcore, which bubbled up through the web late last year to be embraced by several major media outlets. Propagated by the trend-forecasting group K Hole, normcore rejects, in theory, all alternatives in favor of sameness.

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THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
 
For her second solo exhibition at ROOM EAST, Robin Cameron has made a series of new works that address identity, personality types, and the interchangeability of psychological characteristics.

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ARTINFO

MOUSSE

ART BLOG ART BLOG

ROOM EAST will open its first exhibition of work by the Los Angeles-based artist Michael Rey on Sunday 27 April. The works on view combine humor and curiosity; the results of which range from subtle similarity to radical difference.

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ROBIN CAMERON

MILES HUSTON

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A two-person exhibition of work by Tony Lewis and Nate Young, which will mine the language of installation-based drawing, will open at 41 Orchard Street on Sunday 16 March from 6-8pm.

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PURPLE

On Sunday 9 February ROOM EAST will open Davide Balliano’s exhibition “Four o Four” at 41 Orchard Street. With a background in performance, drawing and sculpture, he has created gilded wooden reliefs and multi-paneled paintings incised with a detailed pattern of bricks. The works possess the anthropological potency of relics and the meditative force of religious icons.

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THE NEW YORKER

THE DAILY BEAST

A century ago, Marcel Duchamp coined the term “bachelor machine” in reference to the lower half of his Large Glass (1915-23). In conceiving this work of art he developed a vast, enigmatic creation myth whose tenets remain open to interpretation.

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GALLERIST

DAVIDE BALLIANO

THE DAILY BEAST

“According to ancient doctrine, the essence of a thing is considered to be what the thing is. We ask the question concerning technology when we ask what it is. Everyone knows the two statements that answer our question. One says: Technology is a means to an end. The other says: Technology is a human activity. The two definitions of technology belong together.” – Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology” 1949

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WHITEWALL

An exhibition of new work by Kyle Thurman will feature a group of process-based paintings made with pigment reclaimed from dyed flowers, and sculptures of wooden wind chimes stripped of their function.

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MOUSSE

WHITEWALL

“One could say that the press release, considered as a medium, meets its match – for fraughtness, for derision inspiring valedictorianism, for metonymic fidelity to the churning undercurrents of value, taste, power, etc – in the medium of painting. Fine. One could also say that saying that is the cheapest price of admission to the Show.

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While focusing on works on paper, a medium that Dan Shaw-Town exhibited almost exclusively from 2008 until 2011, he became preoccupied with “flatness as a physical condition rather than an assigned value.”

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ARTFORUM CRITICS’ PICK

“When I thought of her it was always night.”

Room East is delighted to open its second year with … BUT THE CLOUDS …, a winter group exhibition, which takes as its starting point a television play of the same title that Samuel Beckett wrote for the BBC. The exhibition presents a diverse array of media including film, video, painting, drawing, photography and sculpture.

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SEBASTIAN BLACK

ROBIN CAMERON

RYAN FOERSTER

AGNES LUX

DAN SHAW-TOWN

G. WILLIAM WEBB

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GALLERIST

Robin Cameron’s practice examines concepts of truth, process, language, and often includes letterpress texts displayed in conjunction with her artworks.

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For his debut solo exhibition, G. William Webb has crafted forms in wood, bronze, marble, porcelain and stainless steel. Each work is suffused with the presence of the artist’s hand, and is an investigation into the mutability of matter. Each is a study in the contemporary condition of sculpture, and an interrogation of the medium’s chief characteristics: its anthropomorphism, its stasis, its monumentality, its inalienable romanticism.

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“We do not start from human beings, those latecomers, nor from language, a more recent arrival still. The world of meaning and the world of being are one and the same world, that of translation, substitution, delegation, passing. We shall say that any other definition of essence is ‘devoid of meaning’; in fact, it is devoid of the means to remain in presence, to last.

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“Have we taken the true and full measure of the quarrel, often of a singular violence, of which the art characterized as “abstract” was made the object throughout the twentieth century, and continues so to be made, at least sporadically within this Janus-faced “present,” which is our lot, looking both forward and back?

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MODERN PAINTERS

Room East is delighted to present “Black Medicine,” an exhibition of new work by New York-based artists Dave McDermott and Nick van Woert at 41 Orchard Street in New York City. The exhibition combines individual works of sculpture and painting installed on two floors of the gallery.

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CONVEYOR

Room East is pleased to present the exhibition “Ruins in Reverse,” a group exhibition that inaugurates its location at 41 Orchard Street in New York City. Inspired by the multifarious output of Robert Smithson and Gordon Matta-Clark, this first exhibition at the gallery celebrates the aesthetic value of the destructive nature of entropy.

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