Repeat Pressure Until
Repeat Pressure Until
Catherine Cartwright, Moyra Davey, Stacy Fisher, Hilary Harnischfeger, Dana Hoey, Pati Hill, Vera Iliatova, Hein Koh, Dani Leventhal, Carolyn Salas, Suzanne Silver, Kim Waldron, Carmen Winant
Curated by Sheilah Wilson
May 21 – June 19, 2016
Opening Reception:
Saturday, May 21, 2016, 6-9pm
Ortega y Gasset Projects is pleased to present Repeat Pressure Until, a material investigation into the spaces between the recognizable and the unknown. Artists in the show use inhabitation and over-inhabitation of both material and societal norms to transform perception and offer new proposals. We cannot avoid the material, social, and cultural worlds we live in. Utilizing understood reference points becomes radical because it implies that all knowns have the potential to be made strange. There is a space opened up when testing limits of ideas or materials. Insistence both strengthens through emphasis and falls apart through over-repetition.
The gendered female body is presented as benignly understandable and simultaneously profane. The object is holding or is held. Dominant can be overthrown.
(Although unnerving, it is made palatable
because it is beautiful and the chaos is momentary.)
Artists in the show suggest ways for us to live inside the known world, while subverting these knowns through the act of placing pressure. This exertion of energy can create new forms and functions out of recognizable tropes and materials. Artists use photography, painting, drawing, video, and sculpture as tactics towards newly imagined versions of that which we know. They shoot arrows of violence, obsession, re-imagined sexuality, kinship, and motherhood into anything in the world around us to which the arrow can cling. There is an ambivalence in understanding that we are our material form(s), gender(s) and role(s), and a courage in using exactly those to imagine other.
It all begins with a geological re-formulation, suggested in the work of Harnischfeger. Elements of color, paper, clay, and remnants from the natural world fuse into a newly stratified past. Fisher and Salas use sculptural forms to forge new ways of taking up space through material presence and pressure. Hill provides a historical foremother to the idea of using the available materials to render them newly and fiercely poetic. Cartwright, Davey, Hoey, Iliatova, Koh, Leventhal, Waldron, and Winant use photography, painting, drawing, and video to create tension between ideas of gendered and expected roles, with twists and reconfigurations of such ideals. There is an uncomfortable yet seductive force at play. We are witnessing the prying open of the lid of our recognizable world. The mirage is made material. Here is a new proposal.
In conjunction with this show, the publication Mother Mother will be released, with contributions from over fifteen artist and writer mothers. This publication makes visible the act of being a mother, articulating conflicts and confusion in being mother, artist, lover, partner, sister, friend, and more.
Ortega y Gasset Projects is an artist-run curatorial collective and exhibition space in Gowanus, Brooklyn. Comprised of artists currently living in Connecticut, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, New York, Ohio, and Tennessee, OyG operates as a cross-country collective and incubator for dialogue and artistic exchange.
For more info, please contact Sheilah Wilson at sheilahwilson@gmail.com
Open Saturdays and Sunday from 1-6pm and by appointment
Ortega y Gasset Projects
363 3rd Ave.
Brooklyn, NY 11215
oygprojects.com
Mother Mother contributors: Laura Larson, Carmen Winant, Suzanne Silver, Laura Letinsky, Jin me Yoon, Johanna Skibsrud, Susan Metrican, Hein Koh, Sarah Rushford, Oraib Toukan, Karla Wozniak, Rachel Mason, Pati Hill, Leeza Meksin, Dani Leventhal, Michelle Herman, Elsie Kagan, Danielle Mylsiwiec, Moyra Davey, Almond Zigmund.
Artists:
Catherine Cartwright works within and across painting, drawing, sculpture, installation, performance, photography and video to explore the nature of the bodily experience in opposition to the social and material man-made. Recently Cartwright has merged her experience as a single mother into her artistic practice to address the specificity of the transgression inherent in the mother-artist duality. Her work is often project-based and influenced by feminist theory and existential phenomenology. Cartwright has exhibited her work in spaces such as Project Row Houses, The Museum of Outdoor Arts, Englewood, Colorado, Boulder Contemporary Art Museum, and at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions. Cartwright received her MFA from the University of Colorado Boulder.
Moyra Davey lives and works in New York. Throughout the 1990s, she exhibited with Colin de Land’s gallery American Fine Arts Co., and from 2005¬ to 2008, she was a partner in the influential Orchard gallery. In 2008, Davey was the subject of a major survey show at the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University and in 2010 a survey of her work was presented in at the Kunsthalle Basel. This Fall, Bergen Kunsthall will mount a solo presentation of her work. Recent solo exhibitions include MUMOK, Vienna, ICA, Philadelphia, and Camden Arts Centre, London. In 2013, Davey had solo exhibitions at Tate Liverpool and Presentation House, Vancouver. She participated in the 2012 Whitney Biennial and the XXX Bienal de São Paulo also in 2012. Her work has been included in a number of recent group exhibitions such as Photo Poetics: An Anthology, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Reconstructions, Recent Photographs and Video from the Met Collection and Photography on Photography, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Way of the Shovel at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Mixed Use Manhattan, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, New Photography 2011, Museum of Modern Art, New York, amongst others. She currently has a solo exhibition at Murray Guy, New York.
Stacy Fisher studied sculpture at The Cleveland Institute of Art and The Ohio State University. She has received fellowships from the Edward F. Albee Foundation, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Chautauqua School of Art. Her work has been shown recently at Bravin Lee Programs in New York, Tiger Strikes Asteroid in Brooklyn, Mass, Gallery in Austin, and Left Field in San Luis Obispo. Other venues in New York City include Cleopatra’s, Regina Rex, Thierry Goldberg, and the Islip Art Museum. She is currently a participant in Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Process Space program.
Hilary Harnischfeger has had solo exhibitions at Rachel Uffner Gallery, (New York, NY); American University Museum (Washington DC); Halsey McKay Gallery (East Hampton, NY); Neverwork, (New York, NY); and Moody Gallery, (Houston, TX). Selected press includes reviews by Jerry Saltz in New York Magazine, Roberta Smith in The New York Times, as well as articles in Artforum, The New Yorker, and Whitewall. Harnischfeger lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She received her MFA from Columbia University and is represented by Rachel Uffner Gallery, New York.
Pati Hill (1921-2014) was born in Ashland, Kentucky and raised in Virginia. Between 1955 and 1962 she published three well-received novels and a memoir. In the early 1970s she began experimenting with the xerography, initially exhibiting her work in solo exhibitions at the Kornblee Gallery (New York). In 1980 she moved to Paris where she attempted to “photocopy Versailles” for a period of five years and continued exploring the medium into her nineties. Other venues that have presented Hill’s work include Franklin Furnace; the Cooper-Hewitt Museum; The Bayly Art Museum(Fralin Museum), University of Virginia; Centre Georges Pompidou; Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; Cabinet des Estampes de la Bibliothèque Nationale de France; Musée Lambent (Versailles); L’Orangerie des Musées de Sens, France; Gallery Modena, Bologne, Italy; the Stedelijk, Museum and Arcadia University Art Gallery (Glenside, Pennsylvania).
Dana Hoey is a feminist artist who has exhibited and taught since 1996. She is represented by Petzel Gallery, NY, and has presented solo museum exhibits at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington DC, The Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture at the University of Maryland, and The University Art Museum at the University at Albany, NY. Currently she has a large video installation Fighters as part of Photography in the Expanded Field at MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA. She was professor at Columbia School of Art from 2001 to 2007, and currently is visiting artist at The Cooper Union, NYC, and Bard College MFA program.
Vera Iliatova grew up in Saint Petersburg, Russia, and moved to the United States in 1991. She received a BA from Brandeis University, and an MFA from the Yale School of Art. She also spent a year studying at the Sorbonne University in Paris. Iliatova attended Skowhegan School of Art in 2004 and was awarded a Free Studio Space at the Marie Walsh Sharpe Foundation in 2007/2008. Iliatova participated in numerous exhibitions both in the US and abroad. Her work was reviewed in numerous publications including: Art in America, Art Forum, The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The Houston Chronicle, and others. Iliatova is represented by Tibor de Nagy Gallery in NYC and Monya Rowe Gallery in St. Augustin, Florida.
Hein Koh is an artist based in Brooklyn, NY. Using a wide range of materials such as fabric and resin, as well as photography and drawing, her work explores issues dealing with the body, gender and sexuality. She graduated from Dartmouth College with a dual B.A. in Studio Art and Psychology, and received her M.F.A. in Painting/Printmaking from Yale. She is a recipient of a Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation Grant, and an alum of the Artists in the Marketplace program at the Bronx Museum of the Arts. Her work has received press in The New York Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Brooklyn Rail, The Huffington Post, and Hyperallergic, amongst other publications. She has also taught and/or lectured at Tyler School of Art, Dartmouth College, Maryland Institute College of Art, and the School of Visual Arts. Recent shows include Hein Koh and Fredman Barahona at Beverly’s (NY, NY) and The Onion and the Ocean at Underdonk (Brooklyn, NY).
Dani Leventhal has recently screened at the Rotterdam International Film Festival, NYFF Projections, Oberhausen, The Ann Arbor Film Festival, Union Docs, PS1, The Nightingale and Anthology Film Archives. She is the recipient of a Wexner Film/Video Residency Award, the Kazuko Trust, the Eileen Maitland Award and Astraea Lesbian Foundation for Justice Visual Arts Grant. In 2003 she received an MFA in sculpture from the University of Illinois at Chicago and in 2009 an MFA in film/video from Bard College. Her drawings are in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art. Currently Dani lives in Columbus and is an assistant professor of drawing at Ohio State University.
Carolyn Salas earned a B.F.A in sculpture from College of Santa Fe and an M.F.A from CUNY Hunter College. She has exhibited at museums including: The Torrance Art Museum, Torrance, CA, Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art, Peekskill, NY, The Berkshire Museum, Pittsfield, MA, Urbis City Center, Manchester, UK, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA. Notable gallery exhibitions include: Kate Werble Gallery, New York, NY; Casey Kaplan, New York, NY; Koenig & Clinton Gallery, NY; Artopia Gallery, Milan, Italy; and Parisian Laundry, Montreal. She has participated in artist residency programs at Abrons Art Center, AIR space program, NY, NARS Foundation, NY, Fountainhead, FL, among others. Most recent solo shows completed by Ms. Salas have been at Dodge Gallery, NYC, Koenig & Clinton, NYC and Evergold Gallery, San Francisco, CA.
Kim Waldron is a Montreal-based visual artist. Her art practice frequently uses self-
portraiture as a means of engaging with various contemporary social situations. Active in the local, national, and international scene, she has an MFA from Concordia University and a BFA from NSCAD University. She has been awarded artist residencies in Paris, Vienna, Newfoundland, Xiamen, and Beijing. She was the recipient of the Claudine and Stephen Bronfman Fellowship in Contemporary Art and the Pierre-Ayot Award in 2013.
Carmen Winant lives and works in Columbus, OH. She received her BA from UCLA and Masters degrees in Critical Studies and Fine Arts from the California College of the Arts in San Francisco, CA. In 2010, she was a resident at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Winant’s first solo exhibition, Who Says Pain is Erotic?, took place in May at Fortnight Institute; she will have forthcoming 2016 solo exhibitions at Young World Gallery in Detroit and Beeler Gallery in Columbus, OH; both shows will consider how to be a female artist without foremothers. Her recent projects include an artist book with Horses Think Press titled My Life as a Man and a series of experimental lectures in a series titled DISCIPLINE performed, in 2015, at Skowhegan, COR&P (Columbus), MoCA Los Angeles, Regina Rex (NY), Printed Matter (NY), 356 Mission (Los Angeles), and the University of Cincinnati. She is currently at work on an experimental book about practice.