Tag: 2010
Tomoo Gokita
Copenhagen Graffiti (Live Action) //
Time’s Arrow //
»I REMAIN SILENT«
Richard Galpin
On May 7, 2010, a new artwork by Richard Galpin, entitled Viewing Station, will debut on the High Line, New York City’s elevated park built on a former freight rail trestle on Manhattan’s west side. Using a specially designed and constructed viewing apparatus, this commissioned artwork will offer park visitors an altered perspective of a particular view from the High Line. One of the wonderful experiences the High Line has provided to visitors is a new vista of Manhattan. Similarly, Galpin’s artwork will offer a novel reconsideration of our familiar surroundings.
Galpin is best known for creating altered photographs of cityscapes. His chosen method of manipulation is to cut and remove the top layer of the coloured emulsion from his photographic prints, exposing the paper substrate. By eradicating part of the photograph, the imagery becomes greatly abstracted. Using clean lines and sharp angles, Galpin’s technique produces works with an emphasis on geometric shapes, recalling early twentieth century movements such as Constructivism, Cubism, and Futurism.
Galpin’s Viewing Station will function in a manner similar to his cut photographs, but will use the view from one point on the High Line as its raw material. Park visitors will look through a viewing apparatus, lined up with a metal screen from which geometric shapes have been cut. Precise alignment of these two devices with the buildings behind them will transform what is seen. By blocking some details of the nearby buildings and revealing others, the artwork will make them appear as optically flattened elements in an abstract composition.
RYAN HUMPHREY
DCKT Contemporary is pleased to present Early American, RYAN HUMPHREY’s third solo exhibition with the gallery. HUMPHREY explores duality through an altered, customized version of an 18th century American interior. The installation hijacks the format of a formal and affluent interior, infusing it with cast-offs and objects more likely found in a rural garage than an antique shop. Class and taste are called into question and the hierarchy of materials associated with social stratification is discarded.
Take a period room from a museum, filter it through the worlds of car culture, metal and hip hop music and the X Games and you end up with this: hand-painted faux wood paneling, console tables, wing back chairs, chandeliers, rugs, girandole mirrors and candlesticks all made from bottle caps, rubber coatings, broom handles, car rims, pop rivets, license plates and sheet metal.
Tread is a hand-painted and lettered found sign from a Brooklyn “flat fix” storefront transformed into a contemporary “DON’T TREAD ON ME” echo of a flag flown during the American Revolution. A series of bird houses incorporate “firebirds” from late 1970s Pontiac Trans Am muscle cars, symbolic of the mythical phoenix resurrecting itself. Good Gay, a banner with the logo from heavy metal band Judas Priest fused with a gay pride rainbow flag, creates a new symbol which highly alters the traditional meanings of the individual parts.
HUMPHREY lives and works in New York City. He will have a solo exhibition at Kunsthalle Galapagos (Brooklyn, NY) September 15 through November 7, 2010. Previous solo exhibitions include The Galleries at Moore (Moore College of Art and Design, Philadelphia) and the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art (Kansas City). Group exhibitions include Queens International 4, Queens Museum of Art (NY) and the traveling group exhibition Will Boys be Boys?: Questioning Adolescent Masculinity in Contemporary Art, curated by Shamim M. Momin. He completed the Independent Study Program of the Whitney Museum of American Art, received his MFA from Hunter College in New York and his BFA from Ohio University.
