Hive, 2005 Watercolor on paper, 12.25 x 7 in Scott Treleaven The Best Kind of Friends are Like Iron Sharpening Iron John Connelly Presents is pleased to announce Canadian artist and filmmaker Scott Treleaven's first solo exhibition in New York City. Following successful solo shows in Los Angeles, Chicago and Washington DC, Treleaven will be unveiling his most complex project to date featuring collage, sculpture, large-scale black & white photographs, and an eagerly anticipated new film. In Treleaven's collages, made from photocopies and Japanese chiogami paper, compositions of young men in cultish groupings or solitary postures are punctuated with bursts of pastoral decoration and color. Congregating, resting or brandishing knives, Treleaven's subjects are intertwined with secular and religous iconographies such as coronations and sacrifices. These tableaus of redemption and exaltation coupled with the floral, animal and skeletal motifs in Treleaven's work suggest a neo-romantic connection to nature and ceremony as indexes of powerful transformative experiences such as violence, death, dissemination and euphoria. In his collages, Treleaven uses photocopies of his own black & white portraits as a nod to the language of photography as it appears in street fliers and handmade zines. In this new body of work, the artist has chosen to include the photographs themselves - atmospheric portraits of friends, thieves, and mystics standing sentry and wreathed in shadows. Accompanying sculptures, constructed from dog and goat skulls, allude to rituals and altars used by the youths inhabiting both the collages and photos. The show will also include a beautiful, new short film that extends Treleaven's mythologies even further. Shot on Super 8 in the grey back alleys of Zurich, real life denizens of this realm enact an allegory that is by turns tender and disturbing, evoking Jarman, Genet and Burroughs. Having already achieved cult status in underground circles, Treleaven's award-winning short film "The Salivation Army" (2002) caught the attention of the Village Voice in 2003 and was screened in the official Art Basel film program in 2004. Based on his experiences publishing a densely collaged punk/occult zine of the same name, the film fleshed out the artist's core obsessions: that a dark, anthropological current unites a number of contemporary youth subcultures; that the latter-day punks and mystics in his photographs and films represent an obsolete (or simply sleeping) warrior class; and that occult and symbolist language still remains the most accurate way of describing and dignifying the human condition. Scott Treleaven was born in Toronto, Canada and graduated from the Ontario College of Art & Design in 1996. He has recently had successful solo exhibitions at Marc Selwyn Fine Art, Los Angeles, Kavi Gupta Gallery, Chicago, Conner Contemporary, Washington, as well as a number of group shows throughout the US, including "Log Cabin" at Artists Space, New York. Concurrent with this exhibition, Printed Matter Inc. will be launching a limited edition book containing Treleaven's early collages, zines and writings entitled "The Salivation Army Black Book". Exhibition: February 18 - March 25, 2006 Gallery hours: Tues-Sat 11am - 6pm John Connelly Presents 625 West 27th Street, Ground floor USA-New York, NY 10001 Telephone +1 212 337 9563 Fax +1 212 337 9613 Email info@johnconnellypresents.com www.johnconnellypresents.com |
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