 Gardar Eide Einarsson: My Scene, 2004 Acrylic on wall, Dimensions variable Walls 'n Things Sebastian Bear-McClard, Gardar Eide Einarsson, Barney Kulok, Tony Just, Cordy Ryman, Maya Schindler, Gedi Sibony, Rob Wynne Sebastian Bear-McClard and Barney Kulok River of Shadows Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery is pleased to present "Walls 'n Things", a group exhibition curated by Clarissa Dalrymple consisting of sculptural work by Gardar Eide Einarsson, Tony Just, Cordy Ryman, Maya Schindler, Gedi Sibony and Rob Wynne and in the project gallery, a video piece by Sebastian Bear-McClard and Barney Kulok. Walls outline space. Essentially they define property or restraint. As an aesthetic opportunity they become limitless - with the extreme being demolition. In this group show, for the most part, walls are involved in the intention of the artists' works. Captured wall space tends to belong to anything over simplified in a dominant culture viz the church, a ruler, revolutionaries and currently, commerce. Garder Eide Einarsson's joke (trick) is irreverence. He inhabits walls which are coopted anyway. His messages are banal and have been used many times already for the "cause." "My Scene", Barbie's new multi-cultural self, and the Lone Star county militia logo speak for tiny intentions given giant proportions. A declaration of independence, and it can not be ignored. The oil pastel drawings "of photo realist portraits of graffiti", as they are described by the artist Tony Just, perform a refined trompe l'oeil. They are the perfect simulacra. The foil of liberty retrieved. Cordy Ryman dis-organizes the architecture and furniture of the wall space he undertakes. He installs a new facade via coloured splints, shards and squares. As they operate amongst themselves the support disappears and the objects infer a form of painting. Maya Schindler, in her watercolors, isolates and objectifies items such as magnifying glasses and guns and knives as well asanimate creatures - i.e. chicks, cats, sheep - all of them very brand-marked. In this exhibition she turns language into object. Whatso ever is cut out and hung on a stem to make sense, or not. In this exhibition Gedi Sibony makes marks on the wall to infer an absence as much as a presence; energy siphoned out and then returned via colored remnants of gestures. Rob Wynne, on the other hand, appears to extrude a gorgeous dew drop substance from within the wall. The mirrored glass lozenge-like shapes pull energy upward within their arrangement and it is called "I think I'm Certain".  Sebastian Bear-McClard and Barney Kulok: Big Window (N 40° 44.378, W -73° 56.749), 2005 Digital video loop, 20.30 minutes Unexpectedly, Barney Kulok and Sebastian Bear-McClard work through revelation. They harness mysterious light sources to reveal the activity surrounding neighborhood walls. Kulok and Bear-McClard's "River of Shadows", proposes that all the world's a screen. Godard said, "Cinema is the most beautiful fraud in the world." Substitute the word "skin" for "fraud" and you have Kulok and McClard's project's essence bottled. Anyone interested in optics knows we see nothing of the substance of things, but only valences of light bouncing off of surfaces. "River of Shadows" explores this idea of total reflectivity, but adds an element of cultural criticism. The light lighting Kulok and McClard's ruddy urban backlots is not mere noir aesthetics, but Dr. Faustus' ad execs canoodling the furthest distant unattended corners of our country with graphic design and wrought hunger. Kulok and McClard are positing that the light we see by is the light of advertising, the light of transaction, of desire. Plants need their "dark reaction" to photosynthesize CO2 into sugar. In Barney Kulok and Sebastian Bear McClard's ill-lit landscape, that darkness will never come. The geisha Coke ad zeppelins of Ridley Scott's "Blade Runner" hover just outside the frame. The television never dims but for a short refreshing breath, and low-grade light pollution is our greatest pleasure, the hearth where we warm our hands. They've just recorded the scratchy noise of the big bang as it crackles out into our far quadrant of physical space. These twelve flat screen videos are a nickelodeon of fading radiation, reminding us that no matter how saturated the hunger of the twentyaughts is, it is still a nineteenth-century shell of architecture - and of power - that it shines upon. Kulok and McClard's work is a GPS of useless beauty. Tim Davis, 2005 Exhibition: June 24 - August 5, 2005 Gallery hours: Tues-Sat 10am - 6pm Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery 526 W. 26th Street, Room 213 New York, NY 10001 Telephone +1 212 243 3335 Fax +1 212 243 1059 Email gallery@nicoleklagsbrun.com www.nicoleklagsbrun.com |
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