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January 9, 2007- February 10, 2007
John Baldessari, Adam Helms, Matthew Day Jackson, Mike Kelley, Paul McCarthy, William Wegman
Perry Rubenstein Gallery
534 W 24th StPerry Rubenstein Gallery is pleased to present a group exhibition with work by John Baldessari, Adam Helms, Matthew Day Jackson, Mike Kelley, Paul McCarthy and William Wegman.
The exhibition is centered on the strategies of omission employed by these six pivotal artists, and the notion that what they choose to omit from their work is just as significant as what they choose to include. Stemming from John Baldessari's comment that, "What I leave out is more important. I want that absence, which creates a kind of anxiety," each of the works selected for the exhibition deals with methods of erasure. For example, Baldessari blocks out his own face with a sheet of paper in an early photographic series. The paper, on which he has scrawled his first name, expunges his visual identity and becomes the signifier within the tradition of self-portraiture.
The skewed bits of narrative and obscured imagery present inconclusive evidence; the presence of absence is crucial. McCarthy equips his sculpture with chunks of information and fragments of reality in order to represent and at the same time distance archetypal characters from a familiar world of illusion. Matthew Day Jackson's fourteen-panel mixed-media work, The Pitfalls of Utopian Desire, exists as drawings on posters of a Conestoga wagon accompanied by the cover story from Time Magazine’s 1978 issue on the Jonestown, Guyana mass-suicides. Jackson uses charcoal to trace the blueprint remnant and hides the pages of the magazine article behind a spectrum of colored vellum in order to highlight both the optimism and the failure of a so-called utopian society.
>From Kelley's variation on a modernist grid made up of a vitrine of systematically arranged comic books and colored panels, to Adam Helms' drawings of masks and hoods, to William Wegman's more than 30-year exploration of conceptualism, editing and censoring merge with questioning and foregrounding. As visually impressive as each piece in the exhibition is, the things that we cannot see become the ultimate mode of seduction.
Books and DVDs related to artists in this show
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