Artist David Huffman @ Casey Kaplan, NYC - "Children of the Sun" Exhibition

David Huffman

Children of the Sun

Casey Kaplan, New York

April 29 – July 26, 2024

David Huffman’s (b. 1963, Berkeley, CA) inaugural exhibition with Casey Kaplan, Children of the Sun, presents a new group of paintings known as “social abstractions” that combine socio-political themes, personal history, and abstract mark-making. Large-scale, densely layered paintings become sites for the artist’s play— swathes of African textiles, spray-painted basketball nets, loose brushstrokes, and collaged imagery merge as a way of storytelling. David Huffman activates these planes with memories of his family’s experience in Berkeley, California at the height of the radical Black Power movement in the 1960s and 1970s, combining material evocative of the quest for self and Black liberation.

David Huffman found himself at the epicenter of revolution at a young age in the charged Berkeley environment. Swelled by the birth of hippie culture, the Black Power movement, and the Space Race, David Huffman, by the age of five, experienced most of what would later inform his life and work. His mother, Dolores Davis, was at the crux of his upbringing, exposing him to the machinations of the Black Panther Party, ultimately designing the iconic "Free Huey [Newton]" flag and the crawling panther in the party's logo in 1968. Inextricably bound by meaning and form, Huffman’s works integrate his mother’s illustrations, serving as symbols of his childhood and a future his community collectively longed for. At the center of Eucalyptus (2024), David Huffman collages a photograph of Bobby Seale, the co-founder of the Black Panthers, embracing him and his brother at Berkeley’s Provo Park festival. They are positioned at the base of a painted tree, miniature, but focal— the two young boys stand next to a stoic Seale, their trio laden with the heft of the past, present, and future. Within Huffman’s swirls of activity and gesture, they are engulfed by the material remnants of a long-served memory.

Three eight-foot panel paintings anchor Children of the Sun — their monumental scale juxtapose smaller format works, each combining imagery and diverse material steeped in personal narrative. With weighted balance, Huffman’s material decisions imply equity in form and content: African fabrics are layered against hard-edge abstract lines and expressionist brushstrokes, while spray-painted sections of basketball netting overlay floral patterns and structured, high frequency stamped words. The abstraction of these elements, along with glittered text like “mental health,” “homeless,” and “payday loans" act as social agents— they are significant to the Black experience and serve as motivators for societal change.

In his most recent series, David Huffman updates his palette— floral patterns and pastel hues recall a sense of awakening. Rebirth, bloom, and a return to nature are at the forefront; specifically, Huffman accentuates the symbiotic relationship between children and nature, perpetually young, free, and full of hope. The multi-racial children of the “New Frontier” (a promise for domestic social reform by John F. Kennedy in 1960) are Huffman’s “Children of the Sun”: together they are reflected by the vibrant color and synergy of Huffman’s expression. Within the residue of his memory, Huffman recalls the rare breaking of cultural bounds, where for a moment in his childhood, there was reciprocity between racial, social, and economic status. If the seeds of change stem from the place cultures collide, Huffman aims to find this elusive middle ground.

The fecundity of nature is balanced by a celestial world that spans planetary orbs and moons, reflecting the expanse of the universe and the search for the supernatural. Huffman integrates a sphinx head across multiple paintings and merges the profile of his mother as a nod to her commitment to Egyptian mysticism and psychic teachings. These spiritual inclinations were integrated with the lessons of Sun Ra, Black American writers like Octavia Butler, Jimi Hendrix, and Star Trek, paving the path for David Huffman as a progenitor of the visual Afrofuturist movement. Huffman’s translation of this genre into the visual arts introduced a world of fantasy to a community typically rejected from the category until then. His acclaimed series of “traumanauts” from the late 1990s depicted a group of Black astronauts inhabiting surrealist landscapes, collectively in search of an elusive “home.” By expressing notions of Black agency, social and creative freedoms, and activism as a means for Black liberation, Huffman’s abstractions serve as a response to a displaced world in need of repair. As the sphinx head in Huffman’s work gazes up towards the sky, it signals the potential of a brighter future and acts as a reminder for humility within a boundless ecosystem.

CASEY KAPLAN

121 West 27th Street, New York, NY 10001

www.caseykaplangallery.com

Liam Gillick Exhibition @ Casey Kaplan, NYC

Liam Gillick

Fact Structures Amount Structures Language Structures

Casey Kaplan, New York

April 29 – July 26, 2024

Casey Kaplan presents Fact Structures Amount Structures Language Structures, Liam Gillick’s (b. 1964, Aylesbury, UK) tenth solo exhibition with the gallery and the final stage of a three-part series that began in Brussels and Berlin. The exhibitions mark a development in Gillick’s work with a new focus on how advanced production is conceptualized and represented. For Casey Kaplan, Liam Gillick presents new wall-mounted sculptures produced from aluminum T-slot extrusions. In addition, four new LED light structures are installed in the center of the gallery. Each individual work is accompanied by a unique print of a book jacket design. The linear sculptural configurations contend with today’s opaque and fluctuating methods of manufacturing, construction, and communication—their neat geometries seemingly indifferent to our uncertainties.

The internal complexity of prefabricated aluminum T-slot extrusions allows countless applications of their structural adaptability. These lightweight elements are the foundational materials used for construction of advanced automated equipment in the production of complex technologies, ranging from microchips to vaccines. By elevating the seemingly neutral building blocks of ultra-modern production techniques into sculptural abstractions, Liam Gillick separates a foundational material from its expected application to propose new models of representation that focus on the materials that shape our world.

The exhibition’s installation removes the T-slot from the smooth hum of efficient assembly lines. Instead, the structures are organized into five distinct compositions, arranged on the wall in a series of compacted panels and open-ended lines. These condensed configurations defy the unseen substructures of a facility or process—the organs and sinew of a space and its goings-on. Titles like Grey Work Load Allocation or Red Buffer Slot generate vague images of how production processes are planned and managed, without distinguishing a specific protocol or part. Forgoing any identifying details and dispelling illustrations of production methods, Liam Gillick asserts each structure as a pure abstraction, furthering an ongoing interest in the gaps between descriptors and the described. Where in the past the logic of Euclidian geometry could form the universalizing claims of minimalism, today we must contend with endless complexity that evades representation. Drawing on Yuk Hui’s concept of techno-diversity, Liam Gillick suggests we need to develop new models of understanding.

Through color and light, concept is tied to form, as seen in Liam Gillick’s 2023 solo exhibition Filtered Time at the Pergamonmuseum in Berlin. Soundscapes and colored light projections refracted the culturally resonant site completed in the tenuous Weimar period (1919-1933) through the filter of our present. Gillick’s practice is intertwined and cumulative: the white LED lights and hues of the custom powder-coatings combine to confuse any underlying narrative or purpose by distancing the object from its predictable setting and turning our attention to the building blocks of an alienating present.

The practice of conveying complex ideologies and processes through minimal forms extends through Gillicks development of “neo-Isotypes” that appear on the covers of framed prototype book designs presented in the exhibition as pigment prints paired with each aluminum structure. Gillick’s abstractions are conceptually founded in a pictographic language developed by Marie and Otto Neurath, which they named the acronym: “ISOTYPE” (International System of Typographic Picture Education) in 1935. This language was grounded in simple pictograms, drawn by German Modernist artist Gerd Arntz, intended to express complex data in ways that would be easy to understand. Marie Neurath’s role was that of a “transformer”—the intermediary between historians, economists, other data collectors and the graphic artists involved.

Liam Gillick proposes that as means of production have become progressively complicated and dislocated from the site of consumption, today’s would-be “transformers” are unable to develop representative images, or Isotypes. With his prototype book jacket designs, Liam Gillick positions himself as a new transformer, developing his own complex abstract pictograms – each in search of an evasive procedure to represent. These prototype book jackets point towards a new fiction that will reveal the fractures and contradictions at the heart of our smooth alienating present.

CASEY KAPLAN

121 West 27th Street, New York, NY 10001

www.caseykaplangallery.com

Garth Weiser @ Casey Kaplan Gallery, NYC

Garth Weiser

Casey Kaplan Gallery, New York

Through March 6, 2021

Casey Kaplan presents an exhibition of new paintings by GARTH WEISER, the artist’s eighth solo presentation with the gallery.

In these new artworks, Garth Weiser amplifies the visual lexicon of his predominately abstract oeuvre by revealing elements of representation within his dense, layered paintings. Expanding upon a unique process whereby divergent compositions are superimposed on a single canvas, Weiser has for the first time turned to appropriated imagery as primary source material. To produce the paintings, Weiser selects images intuitively from a variety of platforms, moving fluidly across niche social media forums, Fanart blogs, gaming channels, and e-commerce sites. Digital media is modified, manipulated and integrated within the textured topography of Garth Weiser’s oil canvases. Each painting surface is built with contrasting layers of thick impasto, weaving virtual figuration and abstract forms until multiple intersecting patterns emerge.

The content of the appropriated imagery ranges from emblematic and provocative to bizarre and banal. Video game avatars and subcultural band mascots fuse with stock graphics, CAD vectors, and textural renderings that are selected primarily for their formal and tactile qualities. The resulting paintings display an acute somatic awareness imbued with a technocratic tilt. Human forms, fossilized within striations of oil paint, adopt bionic qualities that blur the boundaries between animal and machine. The repetition of spiral extremities, as seen in “love” (2020) and “international center of photography” (2020), recalls both human viscera and the futuristic tentacles of a technologically advanced being. Other works unearth monstrous figures lurking behind layers of paint alongside glimpses of biomorphic grotesquerie. These paintings become reminiscent of the visual language employed by late medieval and early Renaissance artists including Hieronymus Bosch, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, and Goya. At the same time, Garth Weiser engages with the formalism of Color Field Painting and Geometric Abstraction and the rough materiality of Neo-Expressionism. By accessing a multitude of art-historical references, Weiser harnesses the expressive power of the grotesque through both representational and material means.

As Garth Weiser builds each canvas, the representational imagery erodes within its abstract overlay. The legibility of competing figures vacillates recalling philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein’s writings on ‘aspect perception,’ whereby a single image or object can contain two distinct representations - both of which can be seen, but not simultaneously. This flickering of perception is akin to the altered waves of an interference pattern, as seen in lenticular printing and holography. The paintings are scared with claw-like lacerations that further complicate the intertwined patterns. Weiser applies thin strips of tape over his compositions as he works, forming indentations within the thick oil paint upon removal. Additional cavities are created by cutting away exterior paint layers with a utility knife, revealing pops of color or glimpses of the printed imagery underneath. This removal process becomes a painterly gesture in and of itself, while also lending a sculptural quality to the canvases.

Both alien and inexplicably familiar, Garth Weiser’s new paintings speak to a collective subconscious permeated by anxiety, dissociation, absolutist thinking, social isolation, sanctimony, and escapism. These evocations are perhaps best illustrated by the recurring “2020” that appears in balloon font across multiple compositions. This number, once neutral , is now a Pavlovian trigger, provoking an immediate emotive response that exemplifies the reactionary nature of our contemporary moment. Contained within a complex web of illusory patterns, the paintings typify the social entanglement that distorts perspective and disrupts our ability to see things objectively, as they truly are.

CASEY KAPLAN GALLERY

121 West 27th Street, New York, NY 10001

caseykaplangallery.com

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Brian Jungen @ Casey Kaplan Gallery, NYC - Drawings

Brian Jungen: Drawings

Casey Kaplan, New York

Through March 6, 2021

Casey Kaplan presents “Brian Jungen: Drawings,” the artist’s fifth solo exhibition with the gallery. The show debuts a selection of recent works on paper that function as a semiotic map through which the viewer can trace a multitude of personal, historical, and pop-cultural referents. An artist of Indigenous Dane-zaa heritage, Brian Jungen’s poetic drawings reflect his ongoing exploration of memory and identity, within a broader context of globalization, ethnocentrism, and commodity culture.

Brian Jungen’s recent works on paper transpose line drawings, loose brushwork, and colorful ink markings in meandering compositions. A member of the Doig River First Nations of Northern B.C., he began drawing as a child and developed his skills while attending art school in Vancouver and during a brief period living in downtown Manhattan in the early 1990s. During this time, Brian Jungen produced hundreds of drawings that he often distributed via DIY methods, including wheat-pasting thoughout the city. By inserting his works in the street, Brian Jungen bypassed traditional institutions and independently bridged the gap between private practice and public consumption. One such intervention is the 1997 artist zine Brown Finger, republished both digitally and in print for the first time to coincide with this exhibition. The zine appropriates cliches of queerness and Indigenous people rendered as caricature, to challenge the Western gaze and the sexual politics of colonialism.

In contrast to his process-oriented sculpture practice, Brian Jungen utilizes automatic drawing as a means for unmediated, creative expression through which to engage various aspects of cultural memory - both personal and collective. This continuity is illustrated in the work, “Ogopogo,” (2020) where a scaled serpent is represented alongside other human / animal hybrids, ambiguous green ovals, and glowing yellow orbs. The title refers to a popular mythological water-being, originating from Indigenous lore and demonized as Ogopogo the lake monster by colonial European fur traders in the 19th century. In his drawing, Brian Jungen collages different symbols of the Ogopogo among graphic, abstract elements, in an exuberant cacophony of color, line, and form. The work conjures not one definitive narrative of the Ogopogo, but rather engages the rich lineage of oral tradition and sublimation of indigenous histories. A more personal exploration is evident in “My Mother Enduring Harassment” (2021). In this artwork, Brian Jungen portrays his mother as a winged angel, depicted alone but moving with confident determination. As a child, Brian Jungen’s mother adamantly encouraged his predilection for drawing. At the age of seven, Brian Jungen tragically lost both of his parents in a house fire. Brian Jungen draws his mother in mid-step, approaching a circular formation of cartoonish male figures. Collectively, these characters symbolize one of many oppressive forces that the artist’s mother had to confront throughout her lifetime. Here, Brian Jungen demonstrates the power of drawing to explore not only personal memories, but also to reimagine the life experiences of others, executed with unwavering empathy, tenderness, and grace.

Many of the drawings employ a new stamping technique achieved by cutting shapes from scraps of leather and buckskin. Brian Jungen drags the graphic cutouts through ink and presses them directly onto the paper, creating crude, stamped figures that are interwoven with playful renderings of nature, folklore, pirouetting figures, and cultural emblems. Instead of creating an illusion of depth through shading, Brian Jungen stacks his line drawings such that the viewer is confronted with a palimpsest of symbols, challenging the two-dimensional flatness of drawing. “Fever Dream” (2020), as an example, depicts a bus traveling through a psychedelic forest of mushrooms, rendered in warm ochre tones. The touristic scene emerges through lyrical red lines of varying density that form bulbous, heart-shaped curves. As with all of the artworks in this show, the composition is indeterminate; a drawing in the present tense. The viewer perceives suggestions, subtle implications, and questions with no definite answers or visual resolve - each form a potential cipher within channels of coded information.

Cohesively, the artworks in the exhibition celebrate drawing as a limitless imaginative plane where disparate ideas and modes of existence can be explored without restraint. Loose and gestural, the ink drawings offer an intimate look into the artist’s creative psyche and new windows of perception. While rife with cultural critique, the drawings speak not only to the transgressions of humanity, but to the fundamental aspects of human nature that unite us. Brian Jungen recently reflected on his hope for viewers’ experience, stating: “Perhaps these drawings can share a little of the loneliness, humor and revere that resides in us all.”

BRIAN JUNGEN (b. 1970, Fort St. John, B.C.) lives and works in the North Okanagan region of British Columbia. In 2019, his work was the subject of a major survey exhibition at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto with a fully illustrated color catalogue published on the occasion. Additional solo exhibitions include: Casey Kaplan, New York; Hannover Kunstverein; Bonner Kunstverein; Art Gallery of Alberta, Edmonton; Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; The Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, Washington, D.C.; Museum Villa Stuck, Münich; Witte de With, Rotterdam; Tate Modern, London; Vancouver Art Gallery; Musée d’art Contemporain de Montréal; New Museum, New York and CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco. Recent group exhibitions include: The Weatherspoon Art Museum, UNC Greensboro, NC, Contemporary Art Center, Cincinnati, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AK, The 2018 Liverpool Biennal, UK; Nevada Museum of Art, Reno, NV; Rennie Collection, Vancouver and Vancouver Art. Brian Jungen is included in the permanent collections of the AGO, Toronto; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Crystal Bridges Museum of Contemporary Art, Bentonville, AK; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; Seattle Museum of Art; The Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, Washington, D.C.; Tate Modern, London; and Vancouver Art Gallery, B.C., among others.

CASEY KAPLAN GALLERY

121 West 27th Street, New York, NY 10001

www.caseykaplangallery.com

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Sarah Crowner @ Casey Kaplan Gallery, NYC

Sarah Crowner

Casey Kaplan Gallery, New York

Through January 16, 2021

Casey Kaplan presents an exhibition of recent work by SARAH CROWNER. The show, Sarah Crowner’s third with the gallery, debuts a new series of large-scale paintings.

The paintings in the exhibition demonstrate Sarah Crowner’s continually innovative approach to the medium and affinity for formal play. Each composition is made using the unique methodology that has come to define her practice, whereby individual sections of canvas are cut from patterns, painted, and sewn back together. Often forms are recycled or repurposed in a collage-like process; patterns emerge from the negative shapes of older paintings, or an entire composition might be spliced and reimagined on the studio floor. In these new works, the artist expands her visual language through acute variations in scale and color, with an emphasis on secondary colors such as, bright violets, searing oranges and dense grassy green, creating an exuberant, polychromatic environment. Most of the canvases are two-toned, engaging a spatial play between foreground and background through only two contrasting hues, or using raw canvas. The application of acrylic paint in each composition varies from densely saturated swatches of canvas that appear dyed, to loose and familiar expressionist brushwork, to even lighter washes of color that recall the soak-stain technique of Helen Frankenthaler. Proficiently executed, with a keen focus on texture and surface, the artworks reveal the unlimited potential of a singular color.

Cohesively, the paintings in the exhibition do not follow a shared pattern, but rather each adhere to their own internal logic. Some compositions resemble the calculated, geometric repetition of hard-edge painting, design, or woodblock printing. Others are more biomorphic and bear incidental, studio-accrued markings, engaging histories of abstract expressionism, color field and process-based painting. These differing formal and referential qualities lend each painting a distinct character, as if actively asserting their individuality, fluctuating from buoyant, first light elation to elusive, nocturnal guile; the prudent rational of Apollo to the frenetic passions of Dionysus. Many maintain a feeling of transient motion, for instance the undulating tendrils of raw canvas in “Medusa” (2020) that appear to slither across the canvas, like the mythological snakes cited in the painting’s title. A similar gesticulation and dramaturgy is found in two, large-scale, horizontal panels: “Orange and Others” and “Night Painting with Verticals” (both 2020) that, installed together, create a panoramic effect. The individual compositions unfold bidirectionally, legible from stage left or stage right. Symmetry is suggested, but withheld as shapes are reproduced, spliced, contorted and cut off in their turbulent tumble across the canvas.

This atmosphere of movement assimilates Sarah Crowner’s own physical and performative practice, whereby she shifts between the studio floor and the wall, deconstructing and rearranging canvas segments and allowing her compositions to settle intuitively within the picture plane. Through this process, each shape - repeated or unique - functions as an abstract building block that can be used to create new narratives. Culling inspiration from art history and the organic world, the works in the exhibition maintain a kinetic and fertile quality, rife with the lush hues of nature. With a masterful handling of surface, color and form, Sarah Crowner continues to challenge the constraints of material and embrace the endless possibilities of abstraction.

SARAH CROWNER (b. 1974, Philadelphia, PA) lives and works in New York. Forthcoming exhibitions and projects include The Museo Amparo, Puebla, Mexico, Fall 2021 and a large-scale commission for the US Embassy of Honduras in 2022. Recent projects include participation in the 57th edition of the Carnegie International (2018); scenography and costume design for Jessica Lang’s “Garden Blue” with the American Ballet Theater (2018); as well as the permanent site-specific installation at the Wright Restaurant at the Guggenheim Museum (2017.) In 2013 Sarah Crowner participated in a major survey exhibition on abstract painting at the Walker Art Center in MN and was included in the 2010 Whitney Biennial curated by Francesco Bonami and Gary Carrion-Murayari. Her work is held in the collections of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; the Carnegie Museum, Pittsburgh, PA; and the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, North Adams, MA amongst others.

CASEY KAPLAN

121 West 27th Street, New York, NY 10001

caseykaplangallery.com

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Judith Eisler, Casey Kaplan Gallery, NYC - Riffs. Jarman’s Caravaggio

Judith Eisler: Riffs. Jarman’s Caravaggio

Casey Kaplan Gallery, New York

September 6 - October 20, 2018

Casey Kaplan presents JUDITH EISLER: Riffs. Jarman’s Caravaggio. For the artist’s first exhibition with the gallery, Judith Eisler presents a new series of paintings based on Derek Jarman’s 1986 film “Caravaggio”.

Judith Eisler paints cinematic close-ups sourced from her own photographs of paused film scenes. With a lifelong interest in film, Judith Eisler often returns to the work of filmmakers such as Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Derek Jarman. In consideration of the formal properties of light, color and space within a single film frame, the artist considers an image’s capacity to exist as both real and fictional. As each image undergoes multiple layers of mediation, Judith Eisler's renderings shift between representational and abstract. Working with oil on canvas, Judith Eisler directs our view to the visual optics of cinematic happenings.

The film “Caravaggio” depicts the story of Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio’s (1571 - 1610) life, filtered through the lens of filmmaker Derek Jarman (1942 – 1994). The script expands upon the sanctioned narratives of what might have occurred. If the film is at all biographical, it is in Jarman’s fidelity to the color, light and tableaus of Caravaggio’s paintings. Jarman either recreates or refers to a number of Caravaggio’s paintings such as Boy with a Basket of Fruit (1593), The Lute Player (1596), Penitent Magdalene (1594-95), and The Deposition (1602-03). The actors and sets are staged and illuminated in a visual style that echoes the dramatic light infusing Caravaggio’s paintings.

Love, lust, and violence permeate both Caravaggio’s paintings and Jarman’s film. While watching the film, Eisler paused the action and took photographs of this fusion of sensibilities, establishing distance in order to study emotionally and psychologically charged themes with a dispassionate eye. Judith Eisler’s photographs capture the transformation of painting through staged reality, film, and transmission. In working from these stills, the artist is rendering and reanimating the material as it is dematerialized. Despite the abstractions caused by the technological interference in this process, a structure is formed: the sum of the parts creates a whole that is simultaneously present and falling into fragmentation.

Judith Eisler questions whether light is a substance or a process. In the film, the source of light illuminating the models is indeterminate. Does it stem from an artificial spotlight or is it high noon? Is the glare providing clarity or illumination, or is it hindering the act of seeing? In the portraits of Tilda Swinton as Caravaggio’s model, Lena, and Nigel Terry as Caravaggio, faces brace against the glare or lower their eyes to turn their gaze inward. Judith Eisler’s interest lies not in recreating the subject of the gaze, which is visible in the film sequence, but to describe what it looks like when someone is seeing.

In the film, The Martyrdom of St. Matthew (1599–1600) is sketched out on a canvas. Terry, as Caravaggio, manipulates his model (Sean Bean) to perfectly mimic the pose in the painting. Judith Eisler was initially interested in how the proto-cinematic light that suffuses Caravaggio’s paintings might be transformed when viewed through a filmic interpretation of his work. As she watched Jarman’s recreation of the artist at work in his studio, Judith Eisler became less interested in painting the physical reenactment of the composition than in describing what it looks like to make something. In turn, the artist began making paintings about the materiality of making a painting. As the brush lifts color to canvas and materials are arranged on the palette, Judith Eisler considers the elements that make up an illusionistic whole.

The palette compositions can be seen as a stage upon which material and tools are laid out in anticipation of the rendering of the subject. Judith Eisler painted several versions of the palette in order to reflect the painter’s preoccupation with raw material and the shifts that occur on that particular flat surface. There are solvents housed in decanters, colors, brushes, both active and at rest. In some of the frames, coins are also depicted, evoking the marriage of art and commerce. But even as the elements seem fixed and interconnected, at the same time they seem on the verge of falling apart, sliding off the table onto the floor.

Jarman uses candles to illuminate the “17th century” studio where the painter works into the night. The candles burn as the wax melts and the expansiveness of the flame is tempered by the simultaneous diminishment of the material. Similarly, the film still contains the seeds for its own disintegration: what appears before our eyes in one moment will transition into something else in the next frame. That moment between what has happened and what is to happen is open to possibility and chance. Things still happen when one is not looking.

Judith Eisler received her BFA from Cornell University in 1984. She has been exhibiting her work since 1995 at venues such as Kunsthalle, Vienna; Hall Art Founda- tion/Schloss Derneburg Museum, Hanover, Germany; White Columns, New York; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Bass Museum, Miami, FL; Hayward Gallery, London; and Castello di Rivoli, Turin. In 2002, she was awarded the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship. Judith Eisler is a professor at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, Austria, and lives and works between Vienna, Austria and Warren, Connecticut.

CASEY KAPLAN

121 West 27th Street, New York, NY 10001

www.caseykaplangallery.com

Garth Weiser @ Casey Kaplan Gallery, NYC

Garth Weiser

Casey Kaplan Gallery, New York

November 2 – December 23, 2017

Casey Kaplan presents new paintings by GARTH WEISER, marking his seventh exhibition with the gallery.

Garth Weiser’s large-scale compositions resume an ongoing concern for spatial abstraction and perspectival deviations. His canvases are meticulously crafted and built through a unique process of taping, spraying, cutting, and scraping. Intricate layers of crisscrossing paint emerge in an evocation akin to neural pathways of the brain. Trapped underneath grated layers of enamel, oil and gold leaf, Garth Weiser’s preliminary gestural markings act as physical traces of memories embedded in a matrix of synaptic connections.

Garth Weiser's new paintings reveal distinct patterns, idioms, logos, and symbols beneath striations of paint. His turbulent under-paintings are achieved through recent material experimentation. Incorporating elements of collage and repurposing cut sections of t-shirts, Weiser is alluding to the ubiquity and inevitable commodification of subcultural ephemera. In one painting, entitled The Walking Dead (2017) a humorous, yet uncanny smiley face, rendered in a post-apocalyptic neon sludge, flickers underneath a thick network of paint. In other works, swathes of tie-dye form a pseudo-countercultural backdrop for passive or even complacent slogans, such as “every little thing is going to be alright” and “l ? DC”. These disparate segments are hybridized into the canvases and then buried by several layers of oil and spray paint. The underlying elements re-emerge only after multiple coatings and excavations. Through this process, the paintings accumulate densely textured surfaces, further obscuring their legibility. Small ruts, recalling the welded markings of excavation-hole covers, fuse with dyed cotton and intersect with larger, burn-like scars. Grooves rise into peaks where the paint coagulates.

The resulting works function as visual riddles with no single solution. The collaged systems appear as though intertwined — vibrating between foreground and background, unclear as to where one ends and another begins. Each composition remains in a constant state of flux, triggering multistable perceptions. In effect, ambiguous sensory information confounds our cognitive ability to process the divergent visual outputs.

GARTH WEISER (b. 1979, Helena, MT) lives and works in New York City and Hillsdale, NY. Garth Weiser was recently the subject of a major retrospective at The Contemporary Austin Art Museum in Austin, TX, with an accompanying monograph published on the occasion. Other recent solo exhibitions include: Altman Siegel, San Francisco, (2014); Casey Kaplan, New York, (2013); and White Flag Projects, St. Louis, MO, (2010). His work has additionally been included in numerous group exhibitions, such as: The Campaign for Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA (2016);l Pattern: Follow the Rules, the Eli and Edythe Broad Museum at Michigan State University (2013); Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo (2012); Nothing Beside Remains, curated by Shamim Momin, Los Angeles Nomadic Division (LAND), Marfa, TX (2011); Seeing is a Kind of Thinking: A Jim Nutt Companion, curated by Julie Rodrigues Widholm, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Chicago, IL (2011); and Big New Field: Artists in the Cowboys Stadium Art Program, Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX (2010). Garth Weiser’s work is held in collections of prominent institutions, including San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas; The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; The Whitworth, University of Manchester, Manchester, England; Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum: Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan; Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago.

CASEY KAPLAN

121 West 27th Street, New York, NY 10001

www.caseykaplangallery.com

N. Dash @ Casey Kaplan Gallery, New York

N. Dash

Casey Kaplan Gallery, New York

May 3 - June 18, 2016

In all of N. Dash’s work, there is an emphasis on the importance of touch and the body’s inherent corporeal intellect. Before language there is touch. Often undermined as primitive or merely sensual, touch remains the implicit compass for how we navigate a world where the sensual is inseparable from the perceptual and conceptual. This understanding remains largely unspoken, which indicates that this is a language of an altogether different nature, complicated in its own ways, passed down through our genes, our culture and our technologies.

N. Dash has always made automatic sculptures out of small pieces of cloth. They are handled until the fibers fray, stain and degrade. What’s left are dirty wads of hugging threads that indirectly document the artist’s everyday, lived experience. Through constant touch and exchange between fingers and fabric, a certain bodily intelligence is indexed, a range of imprinted thought and feeling encrypted. The degraded vestiges are then further translated into an image, arranged in quick succession and photographed. Despite the sculpture’s physical absence, it is precisely only through the image that it reaches its perceptible sculptural form, albeit, only by captured emulsions. These images have been included in a number of Dash’s previous exhibitions.

For N. Dash’s first solo exhibition with Casey Kaplan gallery, these images have been imprinted onto an adobe ground, returning them to a more visceral state. Each image, selected from an ever-growing archive, is inverted and silkscreened, shedding its perfect apprehension, furthering its degradation through the pixel, and loosening its bond with the original pieces of fabric. The resulting silkscreens appear to emerge from the adobe ground like fossils partially uncovered, wild in the innate movement they indicate, but still in their actuality. Despite there always being a connective thread between the paintings and photographs, it is in this exhibition that the two strands are physically bound.

We might liken N. Dash’s paintings to a calculus of intensities, various pressures gauged differently and with precision, like a series of arches held in tension by their keystones. Hinging panels build a subtle environment and their surfaces become a topography of kinesthetic and rhythmic intelligence - line becomes thread, embedded or removed; surface, color, and density all partially reveal their encrypted touch. Lengths of canvas descend in different saturations, pressed and painted, revealing marks through creases and irregularities. Parts inform parts, woven under and over, leaning one on top of another— they are held, bound, touching and resting. 

An essay on the work by Michael Taussig, titled Farewell Before Entering the Void, is currently available through the gallery, to be included in an upcoming publication.

N. DASH (b. 1980, Miami Beach) earned a BA from New York University in 2003 and an MFA from Columbia University in 2010. In recent years, N. Dash has presented solo exhibitions at institutions including the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2014-2015) and White Flag Projects, St. Louis (2013). The artist has recently been included in group exhibitions such as the Jewish Museum, New York (2015); Strozzina Centre for Contemporary Culture (2015); Pier 54 High Line, New York (2014); Berkeley Art Museum, Berkeley (2014); Maxxi Museum, Rome (2014); Columbus College of Art and Design, Ohio (2013); and Los Angeles Nomadic Division (LAND), Los Angeles (2013).

CASEY KAPLAN

121 West 27th Street, New York, NY 10001

www.caseykaplangallery.com

Jason Dodge, Casey Kaplan Gallery, New York

 

Jason Dodge

Casey Kaplan Gallery, New York

January 9 - February 22, 2014

Dear Jason,

To anticipate an exhibition by you in the gallery has always given me an unusual sense of exhilaration. A sensation similar for me to staring out at the ocean – giving me space to think about phenomena that I cannot experience but that I know exist. It is exciting, but in an uncertain way. Uncertain because I tell part of the story, which is not clear until the moment that it happens.

Hence,

We are the meeting.

In the last exhibition at the gallery, you connected a copper pipe in the main space to the water supply for the gallery and ran it out into the center of the room. At the end of the pipe was something similar to a hose crank handle and a small paper tag attached to the pipe that read, “Build a great Aquarium”. A few years later the gallery flooded and was destroyed. Years of work and the lives of many paintings, sculptures, documents, ephemera, prints, photographs, writing, and more were lost. These objects had so much history, and so much potential. The history of the space changed in a surge, flowing in and out, like a breath. We all think about it differently, remember it differently, and a different energy now persists.

Seeing aquariums in the space will be hard. Drawing a line around the electrical charge of the space gives visual and physical life to this energetic presence. Smoke from the chimney is absent, and the sky is turned on its side. Voices and sounds from Mongolia, Georgia, Israel and Brazil, will be trapped inside devices that send them across oceans, forests, deserts and skies, and the gallery itself will breathe light instead of water, from rose to white, white to rose.

A hint of Optimism...

I just read this in Matthew Dickman’s poem:

“A Buddhist monk will wake up early on Sunday morning and not be a fork and not be a knife, he will look down at the girl sleeping in his bed like a body of water, he will think about how he lifted her up like a spoon to his mouth all night, and walk into the courtyard and pick up the shears and cut a little part of me, and lie me down next to her mouth which is breathing heavily and changing all the dark in the room to light.”

It is so beautiful.

I can't wait, thanks Jason.

Love, L

The gallery will hold a reading in collaboration with Fivehundred Places, a new poetry press established by Jason Dodge in Berlin in order to promote a dialogue between contemporary art and poetry. Participating poets include: Caroline Knox, Susan Wheeler, M.A. Viszolyi, Anna Mcdonald, Michael Dickman and Dorothea Lasky.

Jason Dodge’s work is currently the subject of a solo exhibition at the Henry Art Gallery, on view through January 26. Dodge additionally published a two-volume catalogue with the Henry Art Gallery including a book of letters between Dodge and poet Matthew Dickman. In 2013, Dodge participated in the 12th Biennale de Lyon, the 9th Bienal do Mercosul, and oO, the Lithuanian Pavilion at the 55th Venice Biennale. Recent solo exhibitions include The American Academy in Rome, Rome, 2013, LENTOS Kunstmuseum, Linz, 2013, Kunstverein Nürnberg, Nürnberg, 2012, CAC Vilnius, Lithuania, 2011, I woke up. There was a note in my pocket explaining what had happened, Kunstverein Hannover, Germany, traveled to La Galerie, Noisy le Sec, France (2010).

CASEY KAPLAN

121 West 27th Street, New York, NY 10001

www.caseykaplangallery.com

Nathan Carter, Casey Kaplan Gallery, NYC - ALL CITY

Nathan Carter: ALL CITY 

Casey Kaplan Gallery, New York

November 16 – December 22, 2006

NATHAN CARTER presents sculpture, photographs, mobiles, wall relief sculptures, videos, drawings and collages in “ALL CITY,” his third solo show at Casey Kaplan Gallery, New York.

These works attempt to visualize the chaotic intersection of communications, overlapping networks of transportation, and unfolding geopolitical events.

High-density color patterns, lines, letters, and graphic diagrams represent modes of communication such as faxes, Morse code, cell phone signals, pirate radio, ship-to-shore frequencies, air traffic control transmissions, and text messages written on the go. These symbols are intermingled with representations of airplanes, dirigibles, helicopters, subways, large- and small-scale vehicles, communication towers, train diagrams, signage, contrails, and flight patterns. Irreverent texts and menacing abstract shapes add to the sense of disorder, leading to the question: What happens when lines of communication break down?

A partial list of works described in the artist’s own words:

One giant traveling blue and Bavarian cream language machine that uses its alphabet set-up and selection of antennae to send out heavy musical broadcasts, propaganda, and urgent text messages about foul weather and geopolitical schisms.

A loosely affiliated menacing armada of eighteen black and blue dirigibles covered with threatening insignia flying through bad weather in an aggressive formation trying to find a place to land. They're hot under the collar, low on patience, behaving erratically, and looking for trouble.

Six green weather balloon stations sponsored by well-meaning humanitarian/scientific research groups perched on a red landing platform. Greenpeace Rainbow Warrior R.I.P. in Davy Jones’s Locker.

One 747 "Heavy Big Bird" stacked to the rafters with American Youth of university age drinking and self-medicating to dramatic excess while weathering air pockets on a bumpy trans-Atlantic flight piloted by an astronaut and a well-known and much missed literary figure.

A triptych of Harry Beck inspired way-finding subway map diagrams representing New York, London, and Paris.

Three photographs of object collections that tell stories illustrating the answers to the questions: "Hey buster, what's in your pocket?" "How are we going to get the message through to the front if all we have is this old transistor radio?" and "Where did you learn the protocol for Moscow Rules, on the Farm?"

A magnified handy hanging Morse code educational/learning instrument.

Two strange amorphous floating shapes with high visibility symbols and incident recording sensors.

A full set of blue and red text messages warning wandering malcontents, merchant marine types, wayfarers, and information merchants to STAN BAC -- adjust attitude -- fLaP yoUr fLaiR fLApS -- and STAN KLR.

Nathan Carter has recently been featured in group exhibitions including "Level 5: The View from Here: Acquisitions since 2000," Tate Modern, London, UK and “Greater New York 2005,” PS1, Long Island City, NY. The artist had a solo exhibition at Galerie Esther Schipper, Berlin, Germany in 2006 and organized “Fearless Vampire Killers,” Casey Kaplan, New York, 2005. In 2007, Nathan Carter will have a solo exhibition at Da2 Center for Contemporary Art, Salamanca, Spain and at Pilar Parra, Madrid, Spain where he will simultaneously organize a group exhibition. The Final Runnings' “Hella Mega,” will tour Paris, San Antonio and one other location TBA. The artist has recently been short listed for the 2006 International Painting Prize of the of the Castellón County Council, Spain and will show at the Museo de Bellas Artes de Castellón, Castellón, Spain next year.

CASEY KAPLAN GALLERY

525 West 21th Street, New York, NY 10011

www.caseykaplangallery.com

Jeff Burton, Casey Kaplan Gallery, NYC

Jeff Burton

Casey Kaplan Gallery, New York

May 25 – June 24, 2006

Casey Kaplan presents the sixth solo exhibition of Jeff Burton in New York. For over fifteen years Jeff Burton has been involved with Hollywood's adult film industry and has been inspired by the physical and cultural landscape of Southern California. Embracing a role as both insider and outsider, Burton’s photographs exist in a space between fantasy and reality defying any clear definition or category. The artist’s unique body of work travels seamlessly between pornography, fashion, celebrity and art. In Jeff Burton’s most ambitious exhibition to date, the artist presents a new body of photographs that explore the practice of image making and the notion of performance through his personal relationships within Los Angeles.

In a series of small-scale photographs, Jeff Burton re-contextualizes found transparencies from pornography shoots that took place in the 1970s. Each transparency is overlaid with drawings and crop marks originally made by an art director to instruct in the final printing of the image. Alongside these works hang photographs that are a continuation of Jeff Burton’s ongoing project as an observer in Hollywood. The images focus on peripheral objects, landscapes and body parts, isolated, fragmented and disengaged from their original purpose. Much like the visible editing marks in the found transparencies, Jeff Burton’s image making practice is about cropping and capturing distinct moments. Rather than documenting the constructed fantasies of Hollywood, Jeff Burton makes a picture that is as much about what exists outside the frame as what is present in the photograph.

Other photographs in the exhibition emerge from a different Hollywood scene involving Kenneth Anger, widely known for his iconic book Hollywood Babylon (1958), and films such as Scorpio Rising (1964). Jeff Burton received an invitation to document the aftermath of an alleged criminal act at Anger’s Los Angeles home. Somewhere between documentary and performance, the startling images that unfold during Jeff Burton’s encounter with Anger describe a character embodying a dark vision of glamour and decadence that could have come from the pages of Hollywood Babylon itself.

Jeff Burton will participate in the upcoming group exhibition “Into Me/Out of Me,” at P.S.1 Contemporary Arts Center, Long Island City. Since his last solo exhibition in New York, the artist has exhibited at the Sprengel Museum Hannover, Germany; Museum für Photographie, Kunstalle Göppingen, Germany; Galleria Franco Noero, Turino, Italy and Museo Carillo de Arte Carrillo Gil, Mexico. The artist’s monograph The Other Place was published by Twin Palms in 2005. Recently, Jeff Burton’s photographs have been featured in French Vogue; Tom Ford 2005-2006 Eyewear Campaign; i-D and John Waters and Bruce Hainley’s publication Art - A Sex Book.

CASEY KAPLAN

525 West 21th Street, New York, NY 10011

www.caseykaplangallery.com