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Email PageBeyond the Pale
January 18, 2007- February 17, 2007
Reception: January 18, 6:00 pm - 9:00 pm
Shinique Smith, Clifford Owens, Kerstin Brätsch, Paul Pagk, Zipora Fried, Uri Aran, Tommy Hartung, Xylor Jane
Moti Hasson Gallery
535 W 25th St |  |  Kerstin Brätsch untitled (installation) (2007) |
The phrase "beyond the pale" means to go beyond the limits of law or decency. It can also mean beyond sympathy, beyond protection, or having crossed a (figurative) line. It is meant to indicate something transgressive, lawless, outside the norm. By pushing outside the boundaries of what is known, beyond rules and expectations, many of these works are difficult to pin down. Their relations are even harder to discern, except to say they share a similar open-endedness –catalysts for ideas and reflection.
Whether it is the language of documentary film making, or sculpture, or painting, the artists in Beyond the Pale probe and challenge the processes by which we construct meaning. They complicate and disrupt our understanding of the world, making interpretation an uncertain and difficult task. Beyond the pale there is no order, there are no familiar patterns of action, meaning is fugitive and everything is contingent.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Shinique Smith wraps and binds used clothing, accessories and domestic textiles. These items squeezed and bound into bundles on the wall, on the floor or hung from the ceiling, are at once familiar and strange. Within these compressed forms one may recognize a familiar bed-sheet or popular item of clothing, yet thrown-away and stripped of their use-value there is little room for sentimentality. As compacted, hybrid structures, these forms induce a certain degree of anxiety, a feeling that there is something missing in our vision of domesticity, something contained, strange and potentially disruptive.
Kerstin Brätsch’s installation with its photocopied wallpaper and intimately scaled series of paintings of heads seems to examine a similar veiled interiority. Brätsch's work plays along the line between belief and disbelief through approaching the subject of the psychic. The forms she creates attempt to capture the ambivalence the artist has experienced in meetings with actual psychics, through dissolving the distinctions between expressive abstraction and representation. Bold brushstrokes and thick application of pattern and paint dissolve faces into messy miasmas, leaving colors, line and texture. Somehow her installation here is an expression of the desire to know ourselves and others faced with the probability of never knowing.
Tommy Hartung presents a large sculpture appearing like an architectural model in ruins. Everyday objects like planters, dime-store models and cardboard packing supplies were used here as the building-blocks for a kind of classical architecture, calling to mind a bank, museum or library, symbols of the bedrock of our historical knowledge. The whole thing is balanced and pieced together, and in places it seems to fall apart. Dramatically lit and filled with curiosities viewed from different angles and vantage points, one weaves in and out of the sculpture on a rhythmic journey through time. History and its residual visual metaphors are presented decrepit, faux even. A miniature set for a film; a story we long ago stopped believing could be true.
Clifford Owensis an artist who works in a variety of mediums, including video, photography and performance. Owens thinks deeply about the history of performance art and reawakens the underlying structures of audience/performer relations. In the Patterson Project, Owens recreates four early performances by Benjamin Patterson, the only African-American member of the Fluxus movement. Owens quotes early black performance art in part in order to shed light on overlooked areas of art history. This raises obvious questions about the canon and its intransigent blind-spots. This looping of the original and the remake is complicated again through Owens’ documentation. The performance is presented through photographs, whose arrangement upsets the documentary form. Also included is a video piece, and a photograph from a studio visit/performance with Donald Moffett.
Xylor Jane’s paintings begin with self-imposed mathematical systems, often based on the Fibonacci sequence, concealing as much as they reveal. Although Jane is methodical in her renditions of geometric and coded structures, there are subtle break-downs and imperfections. The underlying logic is disrupted by evidence of the artist’s hand and subtleties in brushwork and palette. The resulting works operate somewhere between the cold rationale of minimalism and psychedelic, optical play.
Uri Aran is a filmmaker who breaks video apart into its structural elements: sound, pace, edit and action, disrupting the way story and meaning is developed. The work is based on what appears to be a nighttime newscast filmed in front of a construction site. The newscaster is muted, and instead we hear a disembodied narrator reading a love letter with the exaggerated cadence of a Victorian romantic, describing his feelings for a lover in clichéd terms that rely heavily on animal metaphors. We seek clues to the story through visuals, poetry, and metaphors, unable to piece together the fractured mood and lack of information. Every time we try to make sense, it slips away. We are faced with an open-ended viewing experience, a litany of questions and no right answers.
Zipora Fried creates meticulous graphite drawings, blanketing large pieces of paper with densely repeated lines of consistent shape and form. Like a handwritten letter, the lines move from left to right, from top to bottom, leaving only small borders of blank paper around the edges. The arduously hand-drawn lines are an index of time’s passing She is clearly communicating something through her hours of mark making; however, she has consciously eliminated the signs, letters or words we require to interpret. The lines form an interlocking structure, an impenetrable block of dark grey. She says of her work: I was always interested in the time before language; the time of making a mark without speaking. When one cannot speak one cannot stay silent. I feel the awareness of the unpresentable produced by the recognition of its own powerlessness. It is not the beautiful but the formless that is characteristic of the sublime. Here we cannot know but only think. Pain and pleasure is experienced through the failure of imagination to achieve its goal.
Paul Pagk's normally lush and baroque sensibility is absent in works presented in Beyond the Pale. The work presented challenges what our expectations of a finished abstract painting to look like, as formulated by generations. Hard-edged lines are repeatedly drawn and veiled until they become a blur, forms are veiled under messy paint, and structures are broken down.
Art Reviews of Beyond the Pale
| Village Voice February 1, 2007 | Jerry Saltz | "For a little more than two years, Moti Hasson Gallery has operated out of a boxy second-floor space in a non-descript building at the fringes of the Chelsea art world, on West 38th Street. Despite mounting good shows, the gallery stayed under the art world's radar. Now, like other galleries that have had to come to terms with the primacy of the New York art world's herd-instinct, the gallery has moved into a slick ground-floor space in the belly of the Chelsea beast on West 25th Street. If "Beyond the Pale," the gallery's inaugural exhibition here, is any gauge, the fringe's loss is Chelsea's gain...." |
Books and DVDs related to artists in this show
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