MATTHEW SCHREIBER – SIDESHOW

Posted on 2014-04-28

Johannes Vogt Gallery is pleased to announce Sideshow, the first New York solo exhibition by Matthew Schreiber. Schreiber’s main practice centers around the use of fluorescent lights and laser diode modules. Sideshow spans across both exhibitionspaces of the gallery and combines works across varying mediums including light sculptures, holography, photography, and an immersive architectural intervention that will take over the entire rear gallery. Sideshow is the most invasive project by the gallery to date.

Schreiber’s use of contemporary technology engages a conversation with ideas of the esoteric, superstition and the occult. His practice pits the active image of the past against today’s screen-based image culture of slick and banal immediacy. Tipping his hat to modern subculture’s affinity to immersive techno-spaces, the exhibition’s title subtly references the “Fun House”, a massive nightclub that occupied parts of the gallery’s building complex during the 1980’s.

The exhibition’s centerpiece, GateKeeper, is a site-specific laser installation that engages wall drawing and artificial fog in a blacked-out enclosed room. The resulting work is an immersive environment enveloping the viewer in a wash of immaterial geometric forms. Constrained only by the building’s architecture the lasers physically and ideologically point outwards towards infinity.

Opposite – GateKeeper, 2014

Exhibition runs through to May 10th, 2014

Johannes Vogt Gallery
526 W 26th Street, #205
New York
NY
10001

www.vogtgallery.com

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LISI RASKIN – MUTUAL IMMANENCE

Posted on 2014-04-28

While in Afghanistan, Raskin visited and photographed the museum of the Organization for Mine Clearance and Afghan Rehabilitation in Kabul, the ruins of Darul Aman Palace, and Herat’s Jihad Museum, among other sites, collecting over 15,000 photos. What she exhibits on her return, however, are not the images themselves, but paintings through which she recasts her experience of these sites through a somatic use of materials in her studio. The provisional nature of Raskin’s materials also speaks to the complex and precarious state of the socioeconomic, nationalistic, gendered, and bureaucratic choreography that characterized her trip. The eros within these new paintings reform her aesthetic influences to include some semblance of what has been lost amidst the fragmented residue of Soviet modernism and American exceptionalism transformed by years of war in Afghanistan.

With “Mutual Immanence,” Raskin continues her practice of using strategic ineptitude to expose her own ignorance, doubt, and blind spots, but she does so in a more informed and delicate manner. Her aim is to utilize her own failings to undo the notion of a static, empirical truth, leading us to see our positions and our conclusions as intrinsically connected.

Opposite – Untitled (Painting for AS), 2013

Exhibition runs through to May 31st, 2014

Churner and Churner
205 10th Ave
New York, NY 10011

churnerandchurner.com

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NESSIE STONEBRIDGE – BRITISH BIRDS

Posted on 2014-04-28

Resembling some sort of mid-air collision or interstellar explosions, the energy at the centre of Nessie Stonebridge’s paintings and drawings is centrifugal. Often small in scale, they nevertheless explode beyond their boundaries – their vectors suggestively reaching out beyond their pictorial edges into the gallery space. Stonebridge’s latest series of works draws inspiration from the bucolic, if wild and wind-battered Norfolk coastline, where she now has her studio. Previously rooted in London, Stonebridge’s palette has begun to soften to include murky and Romantic sea greens and stormy blues, although vivid moments of urbane post-punk pink and night-crawler black remain.

At the heart of each of these new images is a fury of beaks, encircled by fanlike, semi-abstracted wings. The result is an aviary of attack and defence, intimating the basic fight-or-flight behaviour of even the most diminutive of birds. Beyond their avian references, these images are impressive for their counterpoising of formal elements. The gestural brilliance of Stonebridge’s mark-making – her paint is scored and splattered with a palette knife, brush or by hand – is contained within a deliberate and considered structural vortex. We could go further and say that for all their allusions to natural and animal forces, Stonebridge’s paintings are fundamentally abstract. They re-route the energy of the external world into a painterly lexicon of sharp, curved edges and electric reds and yellows.

Opposite – Outside In My Comfort Zone, 2014

Exhibition runs through to May 31st, 2014

CARSLAW St* Lukes
137 Whitecross Street
St* Lukes
London
EC1Y 8JL

www.carslawstlukes.com

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