<< BACK

SEARCH

DONATE

Gauri Gill, Halloween Party. San Francisco, 2000, Archival digital print from color negative, edition of 7, 16-1/2 x 50".

Bose Pacia
508 W 26th Street , 11C
212-989-7074
New York
Gauri Gill
The Americans
January 9-February 7, 2009

Shot across the United States from 2000 to 2007, Gill's photographs document the Indian diaspora as it has settled across the country in rural areas, small towns and big cities, both retaining its traditional signifiers of Indian identity and merging within a larger American plurality. The resulting color photographs are simultaneously humorous, poignant, ironic, and beguiling. Gill's portrayal of her subjects and their lives emerges through her strict attention to detail and sympathetic juxtapositions.

Cultural theorist Gayatri Sinha positions The Americans within the framework of documentary photography and post-colonial discourse:

"Nearly five decades after [American photographer] Robert Frank, Gauri Gill takes a series of solitary journeys through America traveling extensively from New York and New Jersey to California to the Midwest and five Southern states. She moves outward, from the nucleus of family and friends to their networks, through a map lined with the material and psychological presence of migrants. The resultant body of photographs, The Americans, emerges as a palimpsest that pays homage to Frank as much as it documents the new Americans — Indian immigrants. That Gill addresses her subjects with the transnational gaze of the traveling photographer brings her subject within the potent discourse of migration and diaspora, post-coloniality and the new world. Set in the chromatic intimacy of the candid photograph, it is inscribed by the material residue of two cultures, of the glittering flecks of Bollywood and Hollywood, the Indian and the American dream."

The series is currently touring internationally. It has been exhibited at Bose Pacia Kolkata; Nature Morte, New Delhi; Matthieu Foss Gallery, Mumbai; Thomas Welton Art Gallery, Stanford University ; Chicago Cultural Center, Chicago.

Born in Chandigarh, India, Gauri Gill received her first BFA in Applied Art(1992) from Delhi College of Art and her second BFA in Photography (1994) from Parsons School of Design in New York. In 2002 she received an MFA in Photography from Stanford University in California. Her works have been exhibited in New Delhi at Vadhera Art Gallery, Gallery Espace, Anant Art Gallery and the India International Centre. Most recently, in 2007 her photographs were included in group exhibitions at the both the Quai Branly Museum in Paris and the Newark Museum in New Jersey. Gauri Gill lives and works in New Delhi.

Gauri Gill, Motel owner Dhansukh Dan Patel's parents, in his new home. Nashville, Tennessee, 2004, Color Print, 16.5" x 50".

O Zhang, 2008, Salute to the Olympics, 2008, c-print, 17-1/2 X 22".

O Zhang, Always Be Ready, 2008, c-print, 17-1/2 X 22".

O Zhang, We are All the Future of the Earth, 2008, c-print, 17-1/2 X 22".

O Zhang, The World is Yours (But Also Ours), 2008, c-print, 17-1/2 X 22".

CRG Gallery
535 West 22nd Street
212-229-2766
New York
O Zhang
The World Is Yours
(But Also Ours)
December 12, 2008-
January 31. 2009

For her first solo exhibition in the United States, O Zhang transforms CRG’s space with an installation that has at its center images from her latest photographic series: The World is Yours (But Also Ours). While some images are viewed as conventionally treated photographs others have been blown up to well beyond life-size in the form of large printed banners, a format deemed appropriate by the series’ historical inspiration; propaganda posters from the Chinese Cultural Revolution. The exhibition also includes a sound installation and a wall mural and is accompanied by a catalog with a short text by the artist.

Having divided her time equally in recent years between the East and the West, Zhang describes the experience of her home country as one of profound ambivalence. In her recent body of work she explores that ambivalence by exploiting the collision of her work’s influences and in doing so, she strives to capture the economic and political conflicts in modern day Chinese culture, among them, the identity crisis facing Chinese youth. The title of the exhibition comes from a speech made by Chairman Mao addressing the youth of the nation at the time of the Cultural Revolution.

Zhang creates, what are in effect, personal revisions of the propaganda that she grew up seeing in Guangzhou, China. The visual impact of such political ephemera is described by Zhang as that which fades away into the periphery of daily life though imbedding itself into one’s subconscious in much of the same way that brand advertising is experienced in America and the West; the message is often forgotten, but the method is not. For Zhang’s series she constructed scenes depicting Chinese youth standing in front of various significant facades in China; some with political history and others with more current resonance. In each image the children wear T-shirts with phrases in what is often called Chinglish — Chinese that has either been poorly translated into English or an emerging new form of modified English that can result in seemingly nonsensical expressions, but that serves as a unique record of China’s current cultural state of convergence and transformation. The slogans at the bottom of Zhang’s images are taken mostly from Mao Zedong’s little red book, of which Zhang’s exhibition catalog bears a likeness, and from speeches by former Chinese leaders like Deng Xiaoping. Together these basic visual and textual elements combine, reinforcing or subverting each other to suggest various political, economic or cultural meanings, often to comic effect.

In the exhibition space Zhang has installed the same public address style horn speakers that once blared government announcements on the streets in China, though here they broadcast a cacophony of street sounds; popular Chinese music, the sounds of restless youth, shoppers, and storefront touters clapping and fervently competing for passer’s attention — sounds that didn’t exist 20 years ago. On one of the gallery walls Zhang has painted in large red Chinese characters: Long Live the Great Unity of the People of the World — a statement that meant one thing to Maoists at the height of the revolution and perhaps another to a generation that has seen both increased prosperity and turmoil from a world more globally connected.

Zhang is the first recipient of the Queens Museum artist residency where she will have her first solo museum show this coming year.

Trenton Doyle Hancock, Miracle Machine #9 or The Furnace that Burned Together Goodness, 2005, Ink and acrylic paint on paper, 10 X 9-1/4".

Trenton Doyle Hancock, Meddler, 2008, Mixed media on paper, 23 X 19-1/2".

Trenton Doyle Hancock, Vegan Arm, 2006, Urethane, steel, string, 84 X 108 X 9", Edition of 3.

James Cohan Gallery
533 West 26th Street
212-714-9500
New York
Trenton Doyle Hancock, Fear
November 20, 2008-
January 10, 2009

Trenton Doyle Hancock is well known for evolving his absurdist narrative of the battle between good and evil executed across a wide variety of media that includes painting, collage, sculpture, print and the performing arts. The artist's densely layered works incorporate text, drawing, collaged paper, plastic, felt, fur and paint to create a collision of symbols and visual tropes that evidence Hancock's singular vision and distinctive means of storytelling.

In this new body of work, which includes paintings, wall drawings and prints, Hancock continues a retelling of his sprawling, epic battle between the force of good, as represented by Mounds and their color-filled world, and evil, as embodied by the skeletal Vegans who live underground in a world of black and white. Peaceful creatures, Mounds survive on Mound Meat, a pink substance that once ingested allows all to experience a life of color. At the center of Hancock's tale are two pivotal characters: Vegan leader, Betto Watchow, and enlightened Vegan prophet, St. Sesom, who introduces Vegans to the world of color. Betto views Sesom's proselytizing as traitorous and fears his increasing power. In reaction, Betto launches an all out war against Sesom, his disciples, and the Mounds.

The main gallery will feature the centerpiece of Hancock's show, a grid-like arrangement of eight five-foot-square canvases installed on a wall painting that references the underworld battleground. These austere works depict Color Babies and Darkness Babies, which Sesom and Betto have enlisted separately as their militia. In the title painting, Fear, a Baby, recognizable by its large egg-shaped head, looms just above the horizon as the black background is showered in pink Mound Meat, suggestive of slaughtered Mounds. The seven other works in this series each illustrate a Baby head amidst the Vegan landscape, lined up as if marching off to battle. In the eight-by-eight foot painting, Institute of Change, Sesom is portrayed using his telepathic powers to generate color, showering the Vegan world with prismatic rays, while in the seven-by-nine-foot painting The Bad Promise, Betto juts his bony black arm across the canvas, reaching his hand beneath a fellow Vegan's head oozing with Mound Meat.

The exhibition will also feature a new portfolio of twenty mixed-media prints, entitled Fix, which the artist recently completed at the Brodsky Center for Innovative Editions, Rutgers University. The print series further evidences the influence of many artists upon Hancock's work, including R. Crumb, Henry Darger, Lee Baxter Davis, Max Ernst, Philip Guston and Gary Panter, as well as the impact of the artist's evangelical Christian upbringing and his insatiable appetite for contemporary art and culture.

Trenton Doyle Hancock is the 2007 Joyce Alexander Wein award winner from The Studio Museum, NY. His work is currently in the exhibitions In the Beginning: Artists Respond to Genesis at the Contemporary Jewish Art Museum, San Francisco, California, and was recently part of the Dargerism: Contemporary Artists and Henry Darger at the American Folk Art Museum, NY. He is included in the Prospect.1 New Orleans Biennial and in 2009 will produce a site-specific installation at the Olympic Sculpture Park at the Seattle Art Museum, WA. In April 2008, Hancock provided the costume and set design for Cult of Color: Call to Color, a collaboration with choreographer Stephen Mills and composer Graham Reynolds for the Austin Ballet, Texas. In 2007, the Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh, hosted Hancock's major European solo show, The Wayward Thinker, which traveled to the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam. Hancock was one of the youngest artists ever to be included in the Whitney Biennial, in both 2000 and 2002. Born in Paris, Texas, Hancock currently lives and works in Houston.

Hancock's work is included in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum, NY; The Dallas Museum of Art, TX; The Modern Art Museum of Forth Worth, TX; Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, The Netherlands; The Museum of Modern Art, NY; Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; Whitney Museum of American Art, NY; The Studio Museum in Harlem, NY; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA; and Museo di arte moderna e contemporanea, Trento, Italy.

Peter Rostovsky, Stadium, 2007, Oil on linen, 78 x 46".

Peter Rostovsky, X-ray Series: Ophelia, 2007, Oil on linen, 28 x 19".

Peter Rostovsky, Corona, 2007, Oil on linen, 22 x 18".

Peter Rostovsky, Boy Alone, 2004, Oil on linen, 60 x 46".

Sara Meltzer Gallery
525-531 West 26th Street
212-727-9330
New York
Peter Rostovsky:
This Distant World
January 8-
February 14, 2009

For the past few years, Rostovsky has been photographing the world around him and collecting images from the Internet as source material for his exactingly rendered, atmospheric paintings. This Distant World continues his fascination with mediation and mediated imagery, presenting a portrait of our time that is both familiar and ordinary, yet charged with allegorical meaning.

The Gymnast Series includes life-size depictions of gymnasts at the moment of dismount from their respective apparatus. Drawing on such diverse influences as Zurbaran, José De Ribera, Robert Longo, and Gerhard Richter, these works are allegories of limbo; figures suspended in space, neither flying nor falling. Each figure oriented upside down operates as a powerful metaphor for liminality, and depicts a state the artist feels is reflective of our contemporary moment — a condition of either potential triumph or of disastrous freefall.

Rostovsky’s paintings of statues continue this dual emphasis on the figure as both classical evocation and victimized body. Here the artist presents the classical form as amputated fragment, by focusing precisely on the absent limbs that characterize most classical statuary. Painted in a hazy, de-saturated palette, these paintings allude to a world of violence and degradation in as much as they channel a fascination with art history and traditional painterly motifs.

Stadium and Target meanwhile engage Rostovsky's longstanding interest in abstraction. Rendering the organizing patterns of a football field and of the curling ice ring respectively, these paintings double as modernist abstractions yet also point to the world of satellite surveillance and smart weapon targeting that has become such a mainstay of today’s visual culture, news reportage and electronic games. Similarly, Cat’s Cradle depicts the familiar children’s game of wrapping string around one’s hands in various geometric configurations. Within this context however, and given the stark Caravaggesque rendering of the painting, this innocuous image doubles as one of entrapment: an allegory of interdependence and of quagmire that references today’s political and economic arena.  

In these works and others, Rostovsky depicts our daily reality as rich with redemptive possibilities yet teetering on the edge of catastrophe. His is a melancholic perception literalized in the haze that has become characteristic of his recent paintings: as if the distance implied by this palette could serve as a metaphor for our own alienation and sense of withdrawal. It is a perception Walter Benjamin famously associated with allegory and melancholy in particular — a perception that sees history as a “petrified, primordial landscape” — as a muted spectacle, simultaneously monument and ruin.

Born in St. Petersburg, Russia, Peter Rostovsky lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. He has exhibited in national and international institutions including: PS1/MOMA, ArtPace, The Institute of Contemporary Art Philadelphia, Santa Monica Museum of Art, Tacoma Art Museum, American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York, NY, S.M.A.K. Museum, Ghent, Belgium, Museum Amstelkring, Amsterdam, Netherlands; and was included in the Prague Biennale, Czech Republic and Rauma Biennale Balticum, in Finland. Additionally, Rostovsky has exhibited at private galleries including: The Project NY; Elizabeth Dee, Salon94, Danese, James Harris Gallery and Gio Marconi among others.