A quick turnaround (so I'm pretty turned around)
A quick turnaround (so I'm pretty turned around)
July 29 – August 12, 2018
Opening Sunday, July 29, 4-6 PM
Curated by Genevieve Sachs
Assistant Curator Jenna London
Artists: Benjamin Albrecht, Joseph Cato, Adriana Gallo, Karen Holt, Sheri Shih Hui, Wendy Krausbeck, Jenna London, Genevieve Sachs, Matthew Sprung
Kunstraum is pleased to present our annual Summer Show titled A quick turnaround (so I'm pretty turned around), organized to highlight the current artists working in our creative community. The featured work builds off of each other into the creation of a temporary parallel realm, utopian in the show’s recurring abstraction. The international and national artists shown represent a diversity of age and interest—the culmination of our mission as an artist hub and incubator: to provide every artist with equal opportunity to freely create. The nine artists featured in A quick turnaround (so I'm pretty turned around) each create work that attempts to pinpoint one’s own position within a larger picture. The viewer is invited to step inside and use this environment as an opportunity to reflect on and respond to current humanitarian climates in our larger worlds, to identify the space that each of us occupies, and to remember to locate the webs of growth and compassion.
The fantastical landscapes incorporated in Benjamin Albrecht’s paintings spin sagas with uncertain narratives, exploring interconnected processes in which human existence is embedded in generating more empathetic engagement and awareness with the world around us. Painting serves as an act of worship for Albrecht, just as creating assemblages is a devotional practice for Adriana Gallo. Gallo’s laser cut mixed media pieces, Grid Study No 2: Window, Sphere, Yellow/Blue and Portable Reliquary No 1, incorporate forms derived from shrines in Italy where the artist grew up. The paneling in her work references architectural forms such as windows and partitions, studying the way that assembly of found material can evoke such tactile qualities of the spaces we construct for comforting ourselves.
The work of Joseph Cato is also sourced from the space he occupied while growing up—embracing a vexing tension between the sublime beauty of the American West and the hate crimes committed there based on expectations to conform. In his paintings Western Scene with Lassos and 4th of July Cactus, Cato addresses and interprets this tension by abstracting common iconography of the West, employing edge frames that both enclose and construct a home to reveal a false sense of security. Similarly, in Nopal Orgánico, Wendy Krausbeck centers on a rendering of a prickly pear cactus, an important symbol of Mexican culture, studying how her own Mexican background converses with this culture by modernizing that iconic image through symmetry and lighting inspired by the Cubist movement of artists such as Diego Rivera and Rufino Tamayo.
In his paintings Patrick at the League and Bird-Watching in America (Can’t Forget the News), Matthew Sprung examines the cognitive dissonance that is required to enjoy routine activities and the paradoxical tension, and ultimate mental fatigue, that stems from it being written off as guilty pleasure. Karen Holt’s drawings Bronx-Manhattan and Staten Island refer to landscape maps, both describing and depicting the forms of specific places and locations in New York. Sheri Shih Hui’s film photographs Impermanence Wu Chang and Revisit the Landscape and Form reflect on the relationship between natural patterns in people and patterns generated by computers. Her work superimposes images of the human form with images of landscape surfaces, serving to invent a new territory that lies between.
Frosted mylar, cut paper, and hand drawn lines ordain mirrored surfaces in Jenna London’s pieces Myline and Dashing, encouraging the viewer to step close and investigate, and to reflect on the space that their body occupies in the specific surrounding environment. Meticulously drafted with each line taking the place of a calculated breath or thought, the works are immediate products of self-reflection and contemplation. Genevieve Sachs‘s The game that I play, an edition of hand bound books of prose and cyanotypes, presents over a year of self-reflection in the form of a chronological compilation of autobiographical musings that dance from character to character along the magnetic line of stark over sharing. Flickering between art object, publication, diary, and micro-installation, the book carries the intimate personhood of the creator into the possession of the rest of world.
Kunstraum is a collaborative community, a shared space—a place of freedom to produce, to exchange ideas and practices, to learn from each other, and to network and benefit from each other’s knowledge and experiences. This exhibition features work that has been cultivated in the Kunstraum studios by our dedicated artist members, as well as Kunstraum staff artists. Address: Kunstraum LLC, 20 Grand Ave, Space 509, Brooklyn, NY 11205 Hrs: Thu - Sat 12-6 PM by appointment only – please contact us first! Contact: Genevieve Sachs, 312.316.5506, genevieve@kunstraumllc.com Jenna London, 860.597.3394, jenna@kunstraumllc.com Social Media: www.facebook.com/kunstraumllc
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Image: Sheri Shih Hui, Revisit the Landscape and Form, digital C-print, 2018