Lucas Monaco, My Costco, 2007, ink and gouache on paper, 22 x 29.5 inches

A Time to Build Up and a Time to Tear Down, curated by Michael Straus

Featuring works by: Cheryl Goldsleger, Ellen Harvey, Lucas Monaco, Ben Polsky, Katrin Sigurdardottir

October 18 – November 21, 2007
Opening: Thursday, October 18, 6-8pm

Frederieke Taylor Gallery is pleased to announce the opening on October 18, 2007 of A Time to Build Up and a Time to Tear Down, the second in its new series of “flat files” shows. Building on the gallery’s own focus on works combining architectural and spatial concerns with contemporary elements of whimsy and imagination, this exhibition – curated by Michael Straus – brings together five artists whose works on paper use forms of designed structures as a point of departure. The artists variously build up imaginary elements in the structures, re-examine and conceptualize the buildings from multiple perspectives, or simply tear them down into ruins. Their uses and abuses of architecture thus become multiple metaphors for the constructive and de-constructive aspects of the drawing process itself.

Cheryl Goldsleger is a Georgia-based artist whose works often take extreme spatial vantage points, as in the drawings shown here of bridges and other complex, engineered structures. The result is a perspective that is on the one hand interwoven with floor plans, while also creating a visual duality between the flat surface and the illusion of depth. These works thus investigate interior spaces, which have been pared down with walls removed to expose the dynamics of structure and supports. In her words, “The unpopulated spaces refer to human presence and absence and how space in and of itself is a metaphor for our own experiences.”

Ellen Harvey, whose larger-scale projects such as A Whitney for the Whitney, Mirror and The New York Beautification Project have featured artworks and buildings displaced from one temporal or spatial location to another, disparate one, has in her drawings for this show imagined the displacement over time of New York or London buildings by nature itself. The result is a deceptively lyrical and pastoral glimpse of a possible future.

Lucas Monaco, a Brooklyn-based artist, has drawn from an imagined aerial view, as though from an airplane on final approach, the highly-detailed yet amorphous boroughs of a city, seemingly New York but perhaps the generalized urban/suburban sprawl, all in a floating sea of air. The conceptualized topography is at once recognizable yet elusive, disturbing in its de-localization.

Ben Polsky, a Newark-based artist, is well-known for his meticulous and elegant studies of the seemingly least elegant of forms: the detritus of industrial America, destroyed buildings, twisted cables, crumbled masonry. It is not sufficient to view these drawings as essentially apocalyptic in nature, as though illustrating a fragment from Joyce’s Ulysses: “I hear the ruin of all space, shattered glass and toppling masonry.” Rather, the very delicacy of these renderings, which are themselves of course artistic constructions, makes them uplifting, not destructive.

Katrin Sigurdardottir, whose recent installation at P.S. 1 continued her exploration in sculpture of the remembered landscape of her native Iceland, takes similarly imaginative leaps in her drawings. Some (as those in this exhibition) are studies of remembered structures; some are of imagined landscapes; some are of conceptualized interiors that seem to mimic landscape forms. Yet throughout her work, as Gregory Volk has written, she “typically scrambles the distinctions between near and far, architecture and nature, immediate experience and layers of memory, while concentrating attention on (and thoroughly manipulating) exactly how we perceive.”

Frederieke Taylor gallery
535 west 22 street 6 floor
new york NY 10011
646-230-0992
www.frederieketaylorgallery.com