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Disnarda Pinilla and Tayo Heuser New Work

June 12, 2008- July 25, 2008

Reception: June 12, 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm

Disnarda Pinilla, Tayo Heuser

Reeves Contemporary

535 W 24th St

Disnarda Pinilla and Tayo Heuser open their exhibitions of new work at Reeves Contemporary with an artists' reception on Thursday, June 12th from 6-8 p.m. The exhibitions run through July 25th.

Through the use of memory and personal experience, Disnarda Pinilla creates dramatic situations involving reality and imagination. From an adult's viewpoint, she reveals specific moments that uncover how children in situations of distress would imagine and feel when confronted with emotions too complex for their years. One could almost storyboard each of Pinilla's installations as they are told from a narrative's perspective informed primarily from these real and imagined scenarios.

Altered objects such as furniture, clothing, accessories, and household items are Pinilla's materials of choice and she utilizes her media to suggest the relationship between adult and childhood memories. Her works communicate the depth of emotional rift and the degree of conflict associated with specific moments in time.

Her use of plastic materials further underscores the distance between the actual and the remembered. The cold, resistant plastic, devoid of impression or any mark or personal history, is a chilling medium for the sculptures. It works to advantage in During The Day, a table installation, with a tumbling chain of bent knives and forks that tell of a violent outburst kept clinically distant in its sanitized, white incarnation. The tablecloth itself, while seemingly a soft fall of fabric, is actually a stiff, resistant, slick white plastic -it is under this unforgiving canopy that the child would hide. The material works equally well in During The Night, a bed installation, where a soft falling stream of feathers, like angel wings, almost covers the bed. The white, glossy surfaces of the feathers again create the luster of an unattainable tableau, underscoring how distant and fugitive memory - both harsh and longed-for - can be.

In June 1998, Disnarda Pinilla moved to the United States after she graduated from a BFA Painting program in Chile. In 2001, after being accepted at School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston in a Post-Baccalaureate certificate program, she found her true voice in the visual arts and applied to the MFA Sculpture program at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth. During her last year at that program, Pinilla's faculty awarded her the 2006 International Sculpture Center's Outstanding Student Achievement in Contemporary Sculpture. She received the award and was part of an exhibition at the Grounds for Sculpture in Hamilton, New Jersey from October 2006 until April 2007. Her work was also featured in the October 2006 issue of the prestigious International Sculpture Center's publication, Sculpture magazine.

Tayo Heuser's mandala-like drawings are a meditation on time as well, but focusing here on the art of standing still, of being in one place. The works themselves require a month or so of work - the preparation of the paper alone is a three-week effort. By applying her masterful drawing to the circle - and circle within circles - she is asking the viewer to stand where they are and occupy their space, however they find themselves.

Heuser is a formalist. Her austere and beautifully crafted drawings are contemplative studies in graphic shape, concentric shadings, and tonal range of color. Inspired by the papers on which religious texts were inscribed in the 1600s, Heuser treats her papers with wheat paste and layers of alum mixed with egg white, which is then highly burnished to achieve a surface that evokes the richness and luster of the Koran texts.

In other recent works, she writes memories, regrets, and wishes on paper, and then obliterates the recorded secret longings with drawing media - pencil, ink, etc., turning the recorded memories into a drawing. Her drawing, then, covers over the very memories that often prevent one from being able to 'stand still'. Viewers are invited to sit at Heuser's table and write their regrets and aspirations as part of an in-gallery art piece.

Heuser was born in Washington D.C., and grew up in Africa and Europe. She received her BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, RI and her MFA from Vermont College. Heuser's most recent drawings will be featured in her upcoming solo shows in January 2008 at the Center for Contemporary Non-objective Art and the H29 gallery in Brussels, Belgium.

Her work has been shown throughout the US, including the David Winton Bell Gallery, Brown University, and the Rhode Island School of Design Museum in Providence, RI; the Elvehejem Museum of Art, University of Wisconsin in Madison, WI; the University Art Museum, California State University Long Beach, CA: and the Weatherspoon Gallery, University of North Carolina at Greensboro.

Heuser's work is in numerous public and corporate collections, including the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, CA, the Rhode Island School of Design Museum in Providence, R. I., the Werner Kramarsky Collection in New York, NY, the Progressive Corporation in Cleveland, Ohio, the Sanyo Corporation in New York, NY, and the Lerner Corporation in Washington D.C.

Reeves Contemporary is open Tuesday through Saturday through July 1; in July the gallery is open Tuesday through Friday, but closed for the July 4th holiday. The hours are 10:00 - 6:00. For more information call 212 714 0044 or visit the online gallery at reevescontemporary.com.

Books and DVDs related to artists in this show

Location map  Address 535 W 24th St, 2nd Fl New York (Chelsea) NY, 10011 United States Phone 212-714-0044 Fax 212-714-0066 Hours Tue-Sat 10-5:30 Add To Tour Nearby: All 5 galleries at 535 W 24th St

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