 Ellen Cantor & Joseph Grigely Lost in Jersey City f a projects is pleased to announce an exhibition of work by Ellen Cantor and Joseph Grigely. Cantor and Grigely, who both lived and worked in Jersey City, New Jersey in the mid 1990s, will be showing work based on their interaction with each other over the past 10 years, as well as a new collaborative film. In New York in the early 1990s, Broome Street became known as the road that divided north from south in Soho - the road that divided galleries like Sonnabend (north) and American Fine Arts (south). But Broome Street also went west, down through the Holland Tunnel, and up into Jersey City, where the only thing that mattered was that Jersey wasn't NYC. Jersey was the otherland, the not-Brooklyn, the not-New York, the place to go where nothing happened -"The steeples are empty and so are the people / There's nothing whatever to see" as Wallace Stevens wrote in his poem "Loneliness in Jersey City." But Jersey's nothingness had its attractions: it was the setting for Paula Sharpe's unhaunting novel "Lost in Jersey City," and even Queen Latifah established digs for the Flavor label in an old firehouse next door to the Manischevitz Matzo factory. Jersey was, for so many people in so many ways, a romantic wasteland - something Robert Smithson eloquently articulated in his essay "The Monuments of Passaic New Jersey." Through the mid 1990s, Cantor and Grigely had separate studios in Jersey City; they met often, shared books and films and criticism, and they made the local 24-hour diner "The Flamingo" their meeting place. Their work evolved in very different directions, as did their lives; it's almost ironic that their ostensible incompatibility is what brings them together. Eventually Cantor left Jersey for Europe when she got divorced, and Grigely left Jersey for Chicago when he got married. "Lost in Jersey City" will comprise works that Joseph Grigely and Ellen Cantor made while living concurrently in Jersey City: drawing stories, paintings, conversations, photographs and videos. A new collaboration piece created through a joint journey back to Jersey City in 2003 will also be presented. Ellen Cantor's first exhibition in London was in 1996 at the Cabinet Gallery in Brixton. Her solo exhibitions include Anne Faggionato, London; Delfina, London; Transmission, Glasgow; Kunsthalle, Wein; Kunstbunker, Nuremberg; Galerie Drantmann, Brussels; Scalo, Zurich; Feigen Gallery, Chicago; Vorarlberger Kunstverein, Bregenz; Marcus Ritter, NY; XL Xavier Laboulbenne, NY; Her group exhibitions include Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam; Edinburgh International Film Festival; 8th and 9th Biennale de l'Image in Mouvement, Saint Gervais, Geneva; and NIKOLAJ, Copenhagen Contemporary Art Center. Ellen Cantor currently lives and works in London. Joseph Grigely's first NYC show was at White Columns in 1994, and shortly afterwards at the now-defunct AC Project Room. He has had solo shows at the Musée d'art Moderne in Paris; The Whitney Museum of American Art; the Anthony d'Offay Gallery; the Barbican Centre; and the Jack Hanley Gallery, San Francisco. His group shows include the 2000 Whitney Biennial; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Portikus, Frankfurt; Kunsthaus, Zurich; and the Venice, Berlin, and Sydney Biennials. Grigely is represented by Cohan, Leslie, and Browne Fine Arts in New York and Air de Paris, Paris. He is Professor of Visual and Critical Studies at the Art Institute of Chicago. 13 September - 11 October 2003 Hours: Tue-Fri 10am - 6pm, Sat 12 - 5pm f a projects 1-2 Bear Gardens GB-London SE1 9ED Telephone +44 020.7928 3228 Fax +44 020.7928 5123 E-Mail info@faprojects.com www.faprojects.com |
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