Meg Cranston 2006
November 14, 2006- January 6, 2007
Reception: November 14, 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm
526 W 26th St
Extended through January 6th.
Venetia Kapernekas Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition by the Los Angles based artist
Meg Cranston. The show includes a group of new works on paper and selected works from the artist’s body of work from the past ten years. The exhibition compliments a retrospective of Cranston's work at Artspace in Auckland, New Zealand in Spring 2007.
Included in the exhibition is a major new work titled Eyes Smell Onions, a large-scale wall collage made especially for
Venetia Kapernekas Gallery. In it, the artist has created a cosmology of onions cum spotlights cum eyeballs that gyrate across a field composed of advertisements from the Los Angeles Times. The concentric circles of the onion image create a mesmerizing effect – an extreme and unstable vitality. We wonder if the center can hold. Our eyes smell onions.
Cranston uses the effect of high contrast and/or high chroma to create a sense of unnamed urgency in many of the works on paper. In the work Asleep at the Wheel, the colors of the spectrum pulsate around a diamond-encrusted wristwatch. The driver is passed out with a color bomb under the seat. In California, a magenta fireball hurls from the mouth of a blonde-haired figure fronting an advertisement for plastic lawn chairs. Color represents itself, electromagnetic energy that plugs in the world and brings good things to life.
Cranston’s recent work seems to be about the pleasure of living in Los Angeles, which the artist describes as “the pleasure of life at it most energetically preposterous.”
Meg Cranston’s work, including sculptures, performance, drawing, photographs, installations, and books, has been shown internationally since 1990. Museum exhibitions include: Museum for Contemporary Art, Seigen, Germany; Marstell, Bayerisches Staatsschauspiel, Munich, Germany, Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam, Kunstmuseum Düsseldorf, Dusseldorf; Haus der Kunst, Munich / P.S.1, New York / Henry Art Gallery, Seattle, Museum of contemporary Art, Los Angeles Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, Landsmuseum Joanneum, Graz, The New Museum and the Whitney Museum New York, and, participation in the Venice Biennale (1993). In 1994 she received the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship.
Books and DVDs related to artists in this show| Location | | | Gallery | Venetia Kapernekas Gallery | | Address | 526 W 26th St, #814 New York (Chelsea) NY, 10001 United States | | Phone | 212-462-4150 | | Fax | 212-462-4115 | | Hours | Tue-Sat 10-6 | |
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