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March 1, 2008- April 19, 2008
Reception: March 1, 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm
Adrian Piper
Elizabeth Dee
545 W 20th St Adrian Piper Everything (installation view) |
Since the late 1960s, Adrian Piper has forged a unique artistic practice that infused classical Minimal sculptural form with explicit political content and introduced issues of race, gender and identity politics into the vocabulary of Conceptual art. She has deployed permutation and seriation-which at the time that Piper began using them were considered non-traditional artistic media- as strategies for investigating the infinite variability of perceptual form and content. In recent years, her artwork has begun to intersect more explicitly with her philosophical work, resulting in a reconsideration of space, time, and infinity in defining the limits and potential permutability of the self as situated on a pre-established grid defined by social and political variables of race, sex, class conflict, and social relations.
Featuring two new video animations, a news media video, indexical text and image installations, sculptural editions, and appropriated and re-worked photographs, this exhibition pivots around a single phrase
Everything will be taken away
as the constant in a system of permutations that comprises the Everything series. Encountered in an excavated wall, etched on the surface of a mirror, emblazoned across photographs from the Hurricane Katrina disaster, or obscuring the face of a loved one in a photograph, the phrase functions as a mantra that reveals itself to have broad philosophical meaning and specific concrete application to the techniques of fading, scrubbing, erasing and removing used in these works. Wallpapered images of assassinated political leaders and facsimiled pages from the Bill of Rights bracket a wall of text reporting the horrifying and racially charged kidnapping, torture, and sexual assault of Megan Williams in rural West Virginia last year. In the context of these figures and events, the phrase holds political as well as personal implications that render its emotional and physical connotations even more devastating. Yet there is another meaning to be gleaned from these words; the possibility perhaps, as Piper explains, for "detachment from all the relationships, communities, values, and practices that make anomaly and ostracism possible."
This is Adrian Piper's first solo exhibition with Elizabeth Dee Gallery and the first solo exhibition of her work in New York since her 1999-2000 retrospective at the New Museum. She has shown extensively for the past four decades, in solo and group contexts, and has been the subject of numerous monographic exhibitions across the United States and internationally.
In addition to the gallery presentation, a satellite exhibition of Piper's historical works from the 1970s-1990s will be presented by Elizabeth Dee Gallery at The Armory Show, March 27-30, Pier 94, New York City. A complete set of the ads printed in the Village Voice in 1973-74 from Piper's The Mythic Being series will be shown as well as individual pieces from the Decide Who You Are series and other works.
Art Reviews of Everything
| New York Times March 28, 2008 | Karen Rosenberg | "The phrase “Everything will be taken away” becomes a mantra in Adrian Piper’s latest exhibition, her first gallery solo in New York since a 1999-2000 retrospective at the New Museum of Contemporary Art. While Ms. Piper’s new works are less confrontational than the body-oriented conceptual art for which she is best known, her voice remains poignant and philosophical...." |
Books and DVDs related to artists in this show
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