Stacks

Mike Bidlo, Pablo Jansana, Judith Linhares, Calla Murphy, Florence Neal, Alan Weiener, Hannah Wilke

Curated by Kathy Goodell

May 30- June 23, 2018

Opening Reception May 31

Rotation 1

Press Release

We are living in troubled times. We feel our own mortality. We sense the fragility of the world and deep within ourselves we hear a clock ticking. The artists in STACK, Mike Bidlo, Pablo Jansana, Judith Linhares, Calla Murphy, Florence Neal, Alan Wiener, and Hannah Wilke create meaning through ordering, collecting, organizing, piling up objects, images, thoughts, memories, plans, concepts–stacking up–both like   and disparate ideas.

These artists address time, its passage, the definition and meaning of time, how time gets spent. They question the linearity of time, how they are marking their days, months, years  on this planet. We all repeat tasks, occupy our days, measure time in standardized ways. These artists are looking at the passage of time and expanding and codifying its meaning. Their processes are giving rise to ambiguity about form and materiality. They recognize that life is ever-changing and that society’s definition of time may not be adequate. The artists’ works raise questions:

How will we be remembered? 

How can we honor our temporality?

As human beings, we are supposedly the only living creatures capable of recognizing our own mortality. This existential awareness is influential in the how and why of creating art. All of the artists in STACK embrace action, process, and the act of creation rather than the object or art as commodity.

In 1984, Mike Bidlo invited participants to engage in a staged reinvention of “The Factory.” There were 2 Edie Sedgwicks, 2 Vivas, 2 Marilyn Monroes, and one Andy. Miriam Jacobs played Gerard Malanga and helped visitors make themselves silkscreens using the Marilyn screen. “NOT Andy Warhol’s Factory“ existed for one afternoon in Bidlo’s attic studio. The walls were sheathed in silver and the floorboards shook with the music of enactments of 60s bands and the Velvet Underground in which Wojnarowicz played Lou Reed and Keiko Bonk played Nico. Written on the wall was a comment Warhol had made about his use of silkscreen: "I tried doing them by hand, but I find it easier to use a screen. This way, I don't have to work on my subjects at all, one of my assistants or anyone else, for that matter, can reproduce the designs as well as I could." In Bidlo’s miniature box of small Brillo matchboxes exhibited in Part Two of STACK, he extends his concept of his Not Warhol pieces. Mike Bidlo lives in New York City.

Pablo Jansana, a Chilean artist now living in Brooklyn, exhibits a painting in STACK, Part One, constructed of  bleached, shredded denim revealing and concealing, stacking the shards, and using the pigment of the worn denim and the loss of its pigment through bleach. The results invoke associations, cultural, political, and lyrically dissects the notions of the lights and darks of landscape painting. In Part Two Jansana exhibits Drumpcomputer Iroques, a photo collage constructed wall piece.

Judith Linhares, most widely known for her painterly figurative paintings that, while telling stories or invoking mythology, are always grounded in the abstract notion of the Gestalt. In STACK, she will exhibit small gouache paintings, a direct and powerful mainstay of her practice, along with a small oil painting. A California born artist, Linhares became known in New York through Marcia Tucker’s “Bad Painting” show at the New Museum in 1978. Most recently, she has exhibited work in the last two Frieze fairs through the Anglim Gilbert Gallery and most recently PPOW. She is also represented by Various Small Fires in Los Angeles and lives in Brooklyn, NY. 

Rotation 2

Calla Murphy will be exhibiting two digital drawings, ink jet prints, in STACK TWO where she utilizes computer language to create works on paper of a mathematically spiritual complexity. Ms. Murphy states “The relationship between large entities and the smaller forms from which they are constructed is the basis of the work. Through digital means I am exploring the point at which smaller forms begin to lose their individual identity to the bigger picture.” 

Florence Neal lives and works in Red Hook, Brooklyn. She is primarily known for her printmaking and drawing installations and has shown and teaches workshops internationally. She will be exhibiting The Liberty Project, 105 days. Ms. Neal writes: “The Liberty Project is and ongoing photo series of the Statue of Liberty taken from my roof and posted every morning to my Instagram account@florence.neal. No text, no hashtags, just liberty and the ever-changing weather affecting the land, the water and sky surrounding her. The series began on January 17, 2017, two days before the inauguration. It began as a personal action to share a daily photograph of our resilient symbol.”

Alan Wiener’s sculptures begin as liquid and end as solid although they appear to be in the process of melting. They are built in layers, accreted, developing in complexity through a modular stacking. Their skeletal forms elude to organic growth, reminiscent of mushrooms or fungi or futuristic architecture, or the film Bladerunner. The relationship of surface is seductive and flesh-like with interiors dry as brittle rock.

Hannah Wilkes’ chewing gum piece made (chewed and formed) in 1984. “I hated the idea of making commodity. Was I selling my soul? So I made a sculpture out of chewing gum, the anal, the oral, the garbage, the saliva. Yet they were little colors, that was the material determining the sensibility. They were paintings and sculptures. They were pink and green and yellow and black. They were stretches and folds. This tiny, minimal form became abstract expressionist gesture.” She equated that the chewing and spitting out mimicked how women are treated as dispensable commodities; taking the discarded sugary substance and modeling them into a soft, cunnilinqual form. She said,”look at these as form. Look at them as beauty. “(1989a)