Thomas Allen, Knockout, 2006
The Affordable Art Fair (AAF NYC) creates an exciting environment for first-time buyers and experienced collectors to purchase original contemporary art by emerging and established artists represented by galleries from around the world including the U.S., Australia, Canada, France, Mexico, and the United Kingdom. Original contemporary painting, drawings, sculpture, photography and prints are available between $100 and $10,000.
Tom Meacham
“the greater good”
We are pleased to announce Tom Meacham’s second solo show with Oliver Kamm/5BE Gallery.
“The title of the second solo exhibition of recent paintings and sculpture by Tom Meacham, “the greater good”, suggests both the altruistic motto of a liberal democrat and the self-convincing rhetoric of a vigilante. Meacham offers an uneasy equation of extremes through a body of work that employs grid motifs on canvas, wood sculptures of “specific object” lineage, consumer objects and mundane materials.
“The piece that lends its name to the show is a large table constructed not as an homage to Juddian Modernism but as a deliberate misreading and displacement of those formal concerns. Laid out on its surface are dozens of knives of varying degrees of menace, from stiletto to machete. This unnerving collection, purchased in bulk through a late night home shopping network, seems designed to appeal not to the average consumer but to those who wish to amass private arsenals. What first appears to be a conventional display of weapons soon reveals a composition organized with the formal principles of a painting. The table’s base, constructed in the form of an ‘X’, reiterates crossed swords in piece that is a simple and sinister meditation on choice and freedom.
“The trihedral motif in the larger paintings, rendered in either electrical tape or ink jet on canvas, is an appropriation of the ceiling at the Yale Art Gallery, designed by Louis Kahn in 1951. Kahn’s innovation, to expose the structure that housed the building’s inner working systems in an elegant and elemental repeating form, was enabled by the Modernist ideology of his day. In Meacham’s work, signs that historically generate ideas of strength and stability are pulled to the opposite pole. In his paintings, imperceptible flaws in measurement, proportion and scale are allowed to accumulate and accrue as the triangular module repeats, resulting in subtly disconcerting optics. The resulting images appear simultaneously relentless and unsustainable. The tape paintings in particular, either hung on or leaning against the wall, appear to be both bandage and scaffold. In Meacham’s own words, ‘the system self-destructs’ with a confrontationally scaled ‘K’, oscillating between polar readings- full (thousands) and empty (strike out). Viewed from another perspective, the symbol dissolves and the piece re-organizes as sculpture- 3 pieces of tape on a plinth.
“Mondrian once famously stated, ‘If we cannot free ourselves, we can free our vision.’ Early in the last century, in order to pursue a neo-plasticist ideal of balance and universal repose, Mondrian abandoned the modular grid because it implied the tragedy of a rigidly ordered vision. Tom Meacham relies upon this tragedy. Every fulcrum point becomes a chance to unbalance the load.”
Cool site and the drawings looks good.
Dear Friends and good women and men:
René Francisco Rodríguez will be representing Cuba at the Venice Biennial (June 10 – 21 November 2007). Raymundo Sesma will be showing a monumental site intervention in the crane of Bâlelatina, Basel (June 13 – 17, 2007). If you are going to be in Venice and/or Basel, I invite you to see both pieces by my artists.
I love you all and wish you all the BEST!!!
William Cordova, Territorial Pissing, 2007, collage on gold leaf
William Cordova’s first solo show in Switzerland “Pachacuti” (Stand up next to a Mountain)
FIGURES ON THE MOVE
They come from the imagination’s subconscious wonderland. They are laughing, jumping, dancing, jerking, twitching and moving around like hectic tap dancers. They are creatures of a kind, fetched from a cabinet of curiosities – and nonetheless they look sorely human, all too human. This is precisely why one feels a strange sense of familiarity when viewing the artist’s pictures. They are about you, me and our peculiar neighbor. And surely also about beings that you still can’t put a name to.
We speak about the figures in the painter Heidi P’s universe. And what we are speaking about is a universe that is entirely her own. She started – seriously – painting about three or four years ago, quickly making contact with an art gallery that sold her pictures in short order. Ever since that time, things have been moving fast – well-deserved. She has – presumably without consciously wanting to – become a part of the wave that is currently raging in the art world, a wave that has to do with the potential of art to communicate in a direct and unpretentious way, without too many filters and theoretical explanations.
But don’t make any mistake about it: Heidi P has a lot to offer – a fertile sense of fantasy, raving humor and a wryly capricious approach of the kind that can only emanate from a wholly uncontrolled poetic sensibility. Call it a seventh sense … or an eighth sense. In any event, it is quite certain that Heidi P possesses a delicate intuition about life’s tumults and more erratic aspects. Her talent is secure and it’s already clear to see that it will develop even further than what we’ve seen up until now.
Her sources of inspiration feed in from everywhere: from her subconscious mind, of course, but also from the figures that she suddenly fastens her eye on, on a billboard, on a street corner or on an old wall. No matter what, as long as it ignites her picture-creating capabilities.
And then there are the colors. To a great extent, Heidi P builds her pictures up in colors. Bright colors, which vividly and jovially resound in the paintings like some kind of music. And then again, she is most certainly not afraid of using the colors in an untraditional way.
In certain periods in her output, she has been “writing” on the paintings. Short sentences – a kind of poetry. But her pictures tell stories in themselves, a profusion of short stories. Or, more precisely, fragments. For it is up to us to guess further, fueled by our own curiosity. There is no answer key.
Cool artist and cool site
New works from Rebecca Stevenson ”INNOCENTS”
Roberts & Tilton is pleased to announce an exhibition of new work by Jimmy Baker. Titled Rapture, the exhibition is a collection of fragmented narratives and artifacts that regard the present as if it were unearthed in a time capsule from our near future.
Baker’s variety of working media presents the inevitable chaos of futuristic digital culture in form of highly refined aesthetics. Classical portraiture, iPods, photography, sculpture and hacked cell phones describe a variety of global concerns that accumulate into a grim dystopian future. The sum of this global turmoil is more the subject rather than its parts. While at once Baker’s future is looming and ominous, it also provides hope by voicing the conscientious and aware. Baker contemplates the structure of information, and how we perceive events in hopes that we will step outside our moment in history.
