Jessica Labatte, Imitators. 2010, 20x24 inches
Mimic
A group exhibition about mimicry, illusion, and material transformation in art.
January 29th to March 15th
Opening Reception
Thursday, Jan 29, 7-9 pm.
Air Circulation
160 Randolph St.
Brooklyn NY 11203
Between Varick & Stewart Ave.
MAP
Curated by: Paddy Johnson and Marsha Owett
Featuring works by: Thomas Albdorf, Dave Hardy, Jessica Labatte, Danielle Mysliwiec, Marsha Owett and Aaron Williams
What are the components of a transformative art viewing experience? Critics have written volumes on the subject, but perhaps the most basic comes from the artistic impulse to mimic and to disorient through illusion and allusion. This show assembles a group of artists whose art challenges the viewer’s perception. Space collapses, materials look like other materials, gesture is scrutinized and transformed. In short, each work is infused with just a little bit of magic.
About the artists:
Thomas Albdorf uses nature and landscape photography as a stage and base material for pre and post photographic interventions. His work often integrates graffiti-related methods and is created through spontaneous arrangements in public spaces and compositions staged in the studio that echo the works created outside.
It’s not always apparent why Dave Hardy’s assemblage sculptures made of refuse glass, foam, and cement stand on their own. Glass stands precariously on foam; foam is stacked on glass. The works often look like they should topple, but their parts push up against each other, suspended in an abject struggle with gravity and time.
Petrified in these rigid arrangements, Hardy’s work seems a little uneasy and a little absurd.
Jessica Labatte mitators makes image orientation a challenge. Through the use of mirrors and camera lenses her photographic abstract assemblages make the difference between the ground and the wall or an object and the reproduction of object almost impossible to discern. It’s these illusions that make Labatte’s work so fascinating; they are a beautiful if slightly unsettling puzzle.
Danielle Mysliwiec weaves with oil paint. Her abstract patterned paintings are informed by nature and personal events and mimic thread seamlessly.
Abstraction and transformation is at the heart of Marsha Owett’s photographic practice. Through a process of taking thousands of shots in a single location—be it a park, a beach, a public space in the city— Owett will intuitively zoom in on details to create abstract compositions. From there she spends hundreds of hours editing and arranging images that often gesture to the painting process.
Aaron Williams works with ideas of construction, abstraction and embedded meaning. For his contribution to the show, Williams visited museums and galleries, taking detailed photographs of paintings by famed abstractionists: deKooning, Cy Twombly, Kline, Motherwell and Guston, among others. He then photographed errant marks which, while prominent parts of the work, are largely accidental: drips, spatter, pools of paint and the remnants created from the paths of strident brush strokes. Isolating these elements, he created a digital drawing which was then carved into painted, construction grade panels. The resulting piece presents an inverse of these accidental marks; they are recast in the role of pictographs, routed into the surface of the panels. In doing so, he questions the idea of the heroic gesture and the spiritual subtext proposed in much Abstract Expressionist work.