No Objective

No Objective brings together artists who make simple gestures in banal materials – paint rolled on a wall, a block of sand placed on a pedestal, printouts covering the gallery – the works communicating an ambivalence towards textual meaning and the value of transcendence as a goal of non-objective art. The assembled artists share a fascination with the affects and after-effects of Modernity, particularly its influence in the aesthetic vocabulary of design and advertising strategies, vernacular architecture and the urban environment.

Skyler Brickley’s methodical rolls of paint in Untitled mimic the appearance of a Xerox print in their grainy texture and grayscale palette: his workman-like system of application recalls both New York school abstraction and inkjet printing. Instead of searching for compositional resolution in something transcendent, the form of the work is a register of the interaction of roller and wall, a result of the artist’s compliance with his tools.

Ivin Ballen’s Troncelitti has a similarly layered relationship to materiality. The artist employs a trompe l’oeil technique to approximate the presence of emphemeral packing materials. Ballen’s seemingly haphazard construction is in fact made with a laborious mold-making process that utilizes resin and paint to immortalize the throw-away culture of late capitalism.

In Ethan Greenbaum’s Lorem Ipsum, A1 text documents are wheat pasted over an entire wall of the gallery. Their meticulous grid-like pattern assumes the form of a declaration, but upon closer inspection, text goes no deeper than type. The Lorum ipsum filler of graphic design is the content, forming a visual structure without linguistic coherence. In David Scanavino’s accompanying works, newspapers are pulped and flattened into discrete monochromatic paintings. These rectangular forms operate as placeholders, occupying the space of their source, but divesting themselves of any communicative ability.

Lisha Bai’s Untitled construction of sand and glass has the iconic solidity of Modernist geometry, even as her use of elemental materials evoke ruin and entropy. Her work, like No Objective on the whole, steers away from the Platonic mysticism inherent in the history of abstraction and replaces it with an interest in material transformation and reconstitution.

THE ARTISTIC PRACTICE OF MICHAEL E. SMITH

Michael E. Smith’s images and objects are portraits, making collages from smithereens of reality.  Smith’s exhibitions are improvisations. On site, he creates assemblages and installations out of profane objects, which are associated with social precarious situations and are marked by their everyday use. They are simple objects of an unassuming life, reduced to the necessary. Repositories that provide shelter or conserve. Or that are close to the human body like clothing and food or that appear corporeal themselves, like when the surface of an image resembles scarred skin.

The characters, to which Smith often alludes in his work, are ambivalent. Leadbelly, Miles Davis, Tupac Shakur, Isiah Thomas, Twiggy Ramirez assume the dual role of heroes and antiheroes; they are successful and yet hated, or they are loved but nevertheless failed. This makes them realistic and tangible. Smith portrays such ambivalent figures and abstracts them. He designs them as traces, signs, memory, and moments of identification.

Thereby Smith turns against the self-idealization of the American society, considering it as ignorant.  He corresponds to Walter Benjamin’s Destructive Character, who destroys false ideals in order to blaze a trail between their ruins – without idealizing the newly  acquired perspective. He does this without accusation or judgment. As a portraitist of the early 21st Century American social reality, Michael E. Smith is a realist and a non-idealist. The vanishing point of his aesthetic praxis is the belief in a hermeneutic of empathy: reading his works means to feel pain, fear, and distraction, as a healing process that is the actual object and impetus of reception.

The individualism, which the western societies conventionalized and idealized ad nauseam, appears as a traumatic existence against the background of a social repression that is systematically suppressed. Smith’s work stems from a deep skepticism towards his own social world, which, nevertheless, remains the only mental realm for orientation. Not an orientation inside a greater societal matrix, but rather a devotion of one’s life to a concrete collective, whose solidarity is perhaps exemplary.

The Detroit-born artist (1977) belongs to a tradition of social-oriented art practice. His motives of social self-purification resemble Joseph Beuys, yet are partly ironically, partly pragmatically twisted and replace Beuys’s shamanism and object mysticism with influences from Hip Hop and Soul. 

 Alexander Koch and Nikolaus Oberhuber, Berlin, October 2008

PHILDADELPHIA – Jenny Jaskey Gallery is pleased to announce the two-person exhibition Between Two States with Trenton Duerksen and Ryan McCartney from July 10 – August 22, 2008.  The artists, who live in two different states – Pennsylvania and New York – produce works that inhabit the spaces between interpretive binaries.  In Trenton Duerksen’s sculptures, functional objects are interpreted for their abstract qualities; they vaciliate between permanence and imperpanence, the symbolic and the everyday.  Ryan McCartney’s paintings also rest within a continuum of values; their intentions as “analogs” place them between image and physical document, abstract and concrete.  An opening reception for the exhibition will be held of Thursday, July 10 from 6-9 pm. 

Ryan McCartney lives and works in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.  He holds a BFA from The Cooper Union and an MFA from Tyler School of Art.  His work has been exhibited in group exhibitions at Thomas Erben Gallery, New York, Fleisher/Ollman Gallery, Philadelphia, and Vox Populi Gallery, Philadelphia. 

Trenton Duerksen lives and works in New York City.  He holds a BFA from The Cooper Union.  His work has been exhibited in solo shows at Galerie Parisa Kind, Frankfurt and Guild & Greyshkul, New York.  He has been in group exhibitions with Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin, Paris, Jacob Karpio Galeria, Costa Rica, and Dam, Stuhltrager Gallery, Brooklyn. He was included in the 2005 Greater New York exhibition at PS1 MoMA.