Slag Contemporary is pleased to announce the opening of Undercover, featuring drawing, painting, sculpture and performance by Joy Curtis, Rebecca Goyette, Carin Riley, Molly Stevens and Trish Tillman.
April 10 – May 2
Opening Reception: April 14, 6-9 pm
Undercover, at its most basic, means going under a cover. This can be a physical barrier or a metaphorical one, a persona you stand behind.
Going undercover implies danger. Sometimes it’s the danger from which you seek protection, the reason why you seek cover; other times it’s the danger that meets you on the other side. Both involve adventure, psychological confrontation, and, in our case, quite a bit of humor.
Once you start labeling sides - front and back, outside and in, the protected and exposed - you realize there is no difference. You’ve become your front. Your front is you.
This multi-approach exhibition is at times revealing, at times stealthy, at times both. Either way, the work goes behind, beneath and beyond in order to keep its truth covert or to blow it open.
Rebecca Goyette’s Bundling Bags call on participants to literally get under cover and hold hands. Based on the Puritan sacks used in coupling rituals, her contemporary version confronts the vulnerability of being present with one other person while in public. Throughout the duration of the exhibition, Goyette will inhabit the bundling bags, inviting viewers to participate in a bundling date with her.
Trish Tillman combines home relics and furniture parts to construct private memorials and characters. They are present like furniture, but are non-functional, and as such, become unsettling talismans or companions.
Carin Riley’s diagrammatic mural Revolution represents underlying forces mapped according to ancient laws of fate and positioning. In responding to the exhibition space it becomes a personal drawing of lithe linework that sticks with you like an enigmatic lesson.
Molly Stevens’s large-scale oil stick drawings put forward vigorous color, shape and line that communicate a direct, fully visual energy. Bold handwork come to form convivial power figures - a soothsayer, a guardian, a knight in armor, each representing safeguarded resolve.
Joy Curtis creates not-quite relics that are familiar at first, but then catch you by surprise. Reminiscent of Romantic ruins, they are in fact cast from contemporary molding and aged. Here, standing in for Joan of Arc - the historical heroine, who donned male attire as a defense in her fight to liberate France - is the stake at which she was burned once charged with insubordination and heterodoxy.
Slag Contemporary specializes in contemporary American and Eastern European art and is operated by owner and director Irina Protopopescu.
Slag Contemporary is located at 56 Bogart Street, Ground Floor #005,Brooklyn, NY 11206
L train to Morgan
For general inquiries, contact the gallery at 212 967 9818.
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