Casey Kaplan

THIS WINTER
SELECTED GALLERY ARTISTS

NATHAN CARTER
BRIAN JUNGEN
JASON DODGE
DIEGO PERRONE
TRISHA DONNELLY
JONATHAN MONK
PAMELA FRASER
JULIA SCHMIDT
LIAM GILLICK
SIMON STARLING
ANNIKA VON HAUSSWOLFF
GABRIEL VORMSTEIN
CARSTEN HÖLLER
JOHANNES WOHNSEIFER

Casey Kaplan is pleased to announce This Winter, a debut of new and earlier artworks from a selection of the gallery’s represented artists. An exciting survey of works from artists who exhibited in 2007 and a preview of what to expect from Casey Kaplan in the New Year, This Winter highlights the diverse aesthetic principles, techniques and ideologies that inspire the gallery program.

In continuation with the artist’s ongoing interest in dubious modes of transportation and non-verbal communication expressed with shapes, patterns and symbols, Nathan Carter presents IT’S A SIGNAL BLACKOUT USE EXTREME CAUTION, 2007, a large-scale, monochromatic, wall-based painted wooden sculpture.

Jason Dodge’s art-making practice provokes the viewer’s cognitive ability to sustain and to imagine a corresponding narrative. At times presented quite formally, and literally titled, Dodge’s art objects are the remnants of events that have already occurred, specific calculations/measurements that have been made, and presences that are absent. He exhibits for the first time, BOUND IN SILVER, 2007, several left hand leather gloves bound together by a strip of silver. Taking the right hand gloves as the subject, the artwork guides the viewer’s thoughts through a poetic and romantic interlude with the anonymous hands of the owner. Also on display is, FOUR CARAT BLACK TOURMALINE AND HALF CARAT RUBY STUFFED INSIDE AN OWL, 2007. Flightless and precious, the bird is one of a series of taxidermy animals encasing valuable gems.

Trisha Donnelly presents, Untitled, 2004, diptych RC prints of blades previously displayed at the 2004 Carnegie International, Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Dominating in size, the swords mark the entryway to a portal. By passing between the prints, the viewer is transformed from one place to another.

A large square canvas depicting a fluorescent, fragmented color wheel, New Rules, 2007 by Pamela Fraser relates to her latest exhibition at the gallery. Best known for sparse bright colors in otherwise black or white backgrounds, Fraser’s works test the logic of established color systems.

Liam Gillick contributes PROPPED DISCUSSION PLATFORM, 2007, a powder-coated aluminum and Plexiglas platform that revisits Gillick’s body of “Discussion Island“ platforms from 1996, where the platforms were attached to a wall and additionally stood on the floor using a series of vertical poles.

Exhibited in “Works from the collection of Magasin 3 Stockholm Konstall,” in 2005, Annika von Hausswolff presents The 21st Century Transitional Object, 2004, a photograph depicting two androgynous bodies beneath a draped, floral patterned blanket. Using the dual languages of the snapshot and that of documentary photography, von Hausswolff’s photograph portrays an enigmatic situation in which the anonymous inhabitants of the spot lit picture plane are rendered static and sculptural.

On view for the first time in the United States, Carsten Höller presents two works, Pistoia Amore and Tortoreto Ondablu, both 2007, from a new series of photographic prints. Depicting merry-go-rounds, water park slides, and roller coasters from European amusement parks, the photographs relate to Höller’s exhibition in 2006, Amusement Park, at Mass MoCA, MA. By further exploring the effects of temporal disorientation through displaced color and shape, Höller illustrates how our experience of passing time depends on our visual perception.

While living and working in northern British Columbia on the reservation where his mother’s family tribe, the Dane-zaa Nation of British Columbia, is located, Brian Jungen produced a series of three new works constructed from standard five-gallon red plastic gasoline tanks. This type of gas tank is ubiquitous in the remote parts of Northern Canada where there are very few fueling stations, a part of the country that is ironically rich in petroleum fields underground. Cut vertically, the halves of the tanks are drilled with thousands of tiny holes to create patterns that are based on Native Canadian Plains Indian beadwork motifs. On view in the gallery is, Death Camas, 2007 a pattern of a poisonous plant, the title of which corresponds with the title of the piece. It is difficult to distinguish the bulb and leaves of the Death Camas from that of the edible Camas, a former staple food of some Indian tribes. If mistaken, ingestion of the wrong bulb could result in death.

Jonathan Monk creates artworks with satirical, personal or humorous twists on the aesthetic practices and artistic ideologies of the 1960’s and 70’s. In This Winter, he shows a new work, ENDING, 2007, a light bulb illuminated wall-based sign that has an ironic temporal presence. Also on display is You’ll Never See My Face In Kansas City, 2007, the third in a series of Volkswagen Type I “Beetle” hoods that appropriate the artworks and performances of artist, Chris Burden.

Diego Perrone presents, Totò nudo, 2005, a 5-minute 45-second 3D digital animation of the popular comedian, Italian actor, writer, and songwriter from the 1950s, Antonio Clemente (also known as Totò), removing his clothes in a snow-blanketed forest, only accompanied by the sound of an acknowledging, barking dog. Despite its virtual and mechanical creation and without a story line, an introduction, or a conclusion, the film invokes and maintains a powerful melancholic reality and challenges the commonly accepted behavioral laws with a sincere display of nudity. Conceptually oriented with the Arte Povera and Transavanguardia movements, Perrone creates videos, sculptures and photographs that use Italian traditions to allude to the cycle of life and death.

Julia Schmidt exhibits a new oil painting on MDF board, Untitled (production), 2007. Inspired by a found image from the 1970s that showed the hand-made construction process at a high-end leather workshop, Schmidt creates an abstract and collapsed composition by cutting, Xeroxing and rearranging the concrete forms of the workbench, tools, leather scraps, and wooden heels in the original image. Mirroring the creative process of craft with that of a fine-art making practice, Schmidt creates a visually seductive and reductive painting that contradicts the original banal source.

Simon Starling continues to create complex narrative situations that link particular materials to their geographical, political and cultural roots. In Trinidad in the 1970’s there were attempts to clear forested areas of all indigenous plant species in order to create a sustainable environment for the introduction of viticulture to the island. This involved planting a fire resistant strain of Honduran Pine, which destroyed any possibility for the revival of local flora and fauna. In ten photographs entitled, Trinidad tree house, 2001-2003, Starling documents the building of a hybrid house,
one that combines the European-style log cabin with Trinidad’s vernacular, using the remnants of these controversial
pine trees.

Gabriel Vormstein presents Oh l’amour, 2006 a painting on his signature, rectangular newspaper-canvases of pages from the Frankfurter Allegmeine Zeitung. Through bright hues of watercolor and gouache, Vormstein appropriates an image from a Modigliani painting of a Caryatid, a female figure in Greek mythology that serves as a column or architectural support. The result is a melancholic, temporal painting that synthesizes cultural and political texts with an art historical reference.

In a new work, Sex-painting III (Simplistic Psychological Model), 2007, Johannes Wohnseifer examines a basic psychological diagram from the 1960’s to create his own sensual, mixed-media landscape using a canvas wrapped in carbon fiber and encased in wax superimposed by pierced, hanging halves of oranges. Philosophically charged, Wohnseifer combines and abstracts references - most specifically, cultural signifiers - in the interest of exploring the aesthetics of politics, war, and the communication of messages.