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Dornner, Weiser, and Rhodes

October 18, 2007- November 24, 2007

Reception: October 18, 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm

Sarah Dornner, Garth Weiser, Davis Rhodes

Casey Kaplan

525 W 21st St

The Casey Kaplan gallery is pleased to announce a new and important divergence from the gallery’s usual program. On October 18th the gallery will open three simultaneous solo exhibitions by the artists: Sarah Dornner, Garth Weiser, and Davis Rhodes. These exhibitions demonstrate the gallery’s desire to highlight three young artists living and working in New York City who have all recently graduated from local art schools.

Sarah Dornner, a recent graduate from Yale University School of Art in 2007, will exhibit a single sculpture along with a new photograph in Gallery I.

Casey Kaplan is pleased to announce the first solo exhibition of artist, Sarah Dornner. By appropriating technologies of representation from the sciences, architecture, and the commercial arts and combining the dimensional properties of video, photography, sculpture, and drawing, Sarah Dornner investigates the ways in which cultural and social constructs inform individual perceptions of space. This exhibition will show two artworks in Gallery I, Catwalk a white, spiral staircase and Hedge, a graphic photograph of a shrub.

Dominating in scale, Catwalk is determined by a mathematical equation. Each unattainable step is 10% smaller than the one that came before it, creating a spiral that continues to infinity. Dornner views this abstraction in cinematic terms through films such as Ziegfeld Girl, 1941 – the spiral staircase from the set is an inspiration for this piece. In Ziegfeld Girl, the Busby Berkeley musical segments break the rules of continuity and result in an impossible space. Viewers are presented with interspersed voids and camera angles that compress the characters into graphic forms. Dornner’s Catwalk distorts perception in a similar way, forcing a dreamlike perspective with infinite space onto a real, architectural structure.

Opposing the monochromatic staircase is the photograph Hedge. The plant depicted is a privet, used mainly for privacy hedging and commonly found in suburban yards. Dornner implements a technique that heightens the gradation of color and creates a mysterious, never-ending abyss. The result is an inert simulacrum of the once organic form.

In the juxtaposition, Dornner contrasts the two artworks dimensionality and the unrevealing, domestic language of the shrub with the fantastic space of the sculpture. Central to her practice, Catwalk and Hedge are analytic abstractions that confound spatial logic.

Sarah Dornner is a Master of Fine Arts graduate from Yale University School of Art.

Garth Weiser, who graduated from Columbia University School of the Arts in 2005, will exhibit five large-scale acrylic and oil paintings in Gallery II.

Casey Kaplan is pleased to announce the second solo exhibition in New York of artist, Garth Weiser. In a practice that hovers between the disparate formal languages of abstraction, minimalism and figuration, Weiser’s paintings are at once figures in space and flat abstractions. This paradox interrupts the logic that painting is a fixed image. Weiser’s new series will present five of his latest large-scale oil and acrylic paintings in Gallery II.

Until recently, Weiser used maquettes as the source for his paintings. He now draws on his memory of these three-Dimensional forms to create small, quick sketches and collages. These studies cross-reference images central to his iconography, including artworks and design objects from the 1980s and 1990s. Expanding on these illusions and recycled visual cues, the under drawings on canvas act as skeletons to the tape, acrylic, oil and enamel that follow.

Weiser’s paintings employ a mélange of color wheels, gradations and value scales using expressive techniques to create luscious surfaces of contrasting colors and finishes. Uniform circles fluctuate between breasts, eyes, and cavities in geometric compositions that evoke colossal heads and torsos. The undulation of palette and surface treatment combines textural, ceramic qualities with faceted illusions of space. All entitled, Nude (#1, 2, 3…) the paintings use this collective language to inform one another.

In a sequential array, the five nudes stage an ephemeral interplay of both subject and context. Through pattern, line, shape, and color, Weiser’s rich textured, platonic paintings re-invent the picture plane with a new space.

Garth Weiser received a Master of Fine Arts from Columbia University School of the Arts in 2005 and has had previous successful solo exhibitions at Guild & Greyshkul, New York and Kavi Gupta gallery, Chicago. In 2007 he participated in “Blackberrying,” at Christina Wilson, Copenhagen and “Destroy Athens,” The Athens Biennial, Greece. Other group exhibitions include, “Greater New York,” at PS1 MOMA, New York and “Hunch and Flail,” curated by Amy Silman at Artists Space, New York.

Davis Rhodes, a recent graduate from Colombia University School of the Arts in 2007, will present an installation of spray painted canvases and over-sized foam-core panels in Gallery III.

Casey Kaplan is pleased to present the first exhibition in New York of artist, Davis Rhodes. Through a single medium – vitreous enamel spray paint – on rectangular canvases and free standing or wall-mounted foam-core boards, Rhodes will present an installation of paintings in Gallery III.

Making use of single colors and strong forms, Rhodes has found a new way to harness the potential of Color Field and Hard-edge painting. At the same time the works mine the abstraction of the contemporary street. Forms that are ubiquitous and found on sign posts, deli awnings, billboards, hip-hop posters, banners, cigarette packs, fitted caps, and asphalt, are quickly translated into colors such as taxicab yellow, Marlboro red and patent-leather black, and traversed with geometric shapes, lines, blurs, and significant digits. Smooth and shiny, the surfaces would be homogenous if not for the remnants of a night out in the street, cigarette ash, or a drip that escaped the speed of execution. Just when the narcissistic facades become a unique and remote urban skin, a reductive swipe acknowledges the artist’s hand.

Yellow Number 1, Jefferson Street, 9.3.07, is a free standing foam-core work. Warped and bending yet evoking a sculptural monolith, it depicts a clean, white number one on a yellow ground. Vulnerable in its medium and stability, it functioned outside on Jefferson street in Bushwick for days as a chameleon in its surroundings only to disappear and emerge weeks later in the gutter with a history now all its own. Representing both ‘one dollar’ and ‘#1’ from an array of urban references, the figure is a singular example of repeated signs in Rhodes’ paintings.

Davis Rhodes’ keen interest in abstraction as a de-contextualized intensity that runs through visual culture has led him to explore the relationships between painting and print media, and a studio practice and public performance. Through form, framework, context and materials, Rhodes’ paintings succinctly blur boundaries between the inside and outside of a painting practice.

Davis Rhodes is a recent Master of Fine Arts graduate from Columbia University School of the Arts.

Reviews of Dornner, Weiser, and Rhodes

New York Times November 9, 2007

Karen Rosenberg

"As buffed and polished as today’s M.F.A. students are, the transition to super-slick Chelsea can throw a spotlight on any rough edges. It helps to have company: These three recent graduates (two from Columbia and one from Yale) look solid enough on their own, but even better in concert...."

Books and DVDs related to artists in this show

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