Ten Years Hunting - [Part One] and [Part Two]

Ten Years Hunting - [Part One]

Beatriz Barral, Steven Brower, Jason Glasser, Caroline McCarthy, Géraldine Pastor-Lloret, Tere Recarens, Mike Rogers, Samuel Rousseau, Stefan Sehler, Joshua Stern

April 23 - May 2, 2010

Ten Years Hunting - [Part Two]

Virginie Barré, John Bjerklie, Edith Dekyndt, Simon Faithfull, Tim Laun, Patrick Martinez, Bruno Peinado, Joyce Pensato, Fabien Verschaere, Gerard Williams

May 14 - 23, 2010

Ten Years Hunting - [The Trophy Room]

Fayçal Baghriche, Mike Ballou, Pattie Lee Becker, Jean Bellissen, Vincent Bizien, John Bjerklie, Matt Blackwell, Willard Boepple, France Cadet, Lana Crooks, Rachel Denny, Jacques Flèchemuller, Jeff Gabel, Ted Gahl, Carla Gannis, Charo Garaigorta, Clare Gasson, Jason Glasser, Tom Kotik, Agnieszka Kalinowska, Charles Krafft, Fay Ku, Nevan Lahart, Claire Lieberman, Patrick Martinez, David McQueen, Myriam Mechita, Kenn Munk, Kurt Novak, Lauren Porter, William Powhida, Ravi Rajakumar, Tere Recarens, Sylvie Réno, Sergio Roger, Mike Rogers, David Rothenberg, Samuel Rousseau, Casey Ruble, Ward Shelley, Tim Spelios, Jacob Stein, Justin Storms, Maarten Vanden Eynde, Susan Wanklyn, Emily Warren, Gerard Williams

May 27 - 30, 2010

Parker's Box is delighted to announce three short exhibitions under the title Ten Years Hunting, to celebrate our tenth anniversary.

The cycle will begin with two shows featuring selected works by all of the artists the gallery has represented in its first decade, divided into ten artists whose work was shown in 2000-2005 and ten from 2005-2010. Many exhibited in both periods, of course, but we have tried to construct a witness of works either that the artists showed in solo shows at the corresponding time, or failing that, works from the same period.

The third exhibition, which will warrant its own press release in due course, extends an invitation to a much wider circle of artists, most of whom have shown at Parker's Box at one time or another. We have asked them to respond to the "Hunting (for art)" theme by contributing to an exhibition of artists' "Hunting Trophies". Responses to date give us the conviction that this will be another memorable project!

Since opening its doors almost in step with the millennium in the spring of 2000, Parker's Box has always striven to seek out artists whose practices are instilled with curiosity towards both the mechanisms of the contemporary world, and the mechanisms that can operate within a work of art. In this way, their ability to innovate, like their choice of medium, is never for its own sake.

This agenda has made for some intriguing and exciting propositions over the last ten years, and we are truly grateful to the artists for providing them, as well as to the public and numerous critics and collectors who have offered enormous encouragement, support and belief in both the artists and the program at Parker's Box. The gallery has seen three extraordinary Associate Directors, whose tireless and often selfless contributions deserve deep gratitude and vigorous applause: Our first Associate Director was Chus Martinez who today is Director of the Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art (MACBA), and she was followed by Allyson Spellacy (now Allyson Smith) who currently works at Gagosian Gallery in Beverly Hills. Hélianthe Bourdeaux-Maurin has been with us for the last four years and her position has gradually morphed into that of Director-at-Large with an increasing presence and activity on behalf of the gallery overseas.

Our hunt for art that truly resonates has always felt like a very coherent search according to the criteria outlined above. At the same time, curating these celebratory exhibitions with what ultimately is a surprisingly eclectic selection of works, is a challenge that may or may not confirm the existence of a "vision". The deepest contrasts indeed exist between the practices of Parker's Box artists, but we believe that their respective preoccupation with methodology, materials and the crucial question of viewer perception, creates common ground in significant ways.

TEN YEARS HUNTING - [PART ONE]
Beatriz Barral, Steven Brower, Jason Glasser, Caroline McCarthy, Géraldine Pastor-Lloret, Tere Recarens, Mike Rogers, Samuel Rousseau, Stefan Sehler, Joshua Stern.

For many of these artists, the analysis, gentle manipulation and understanding of viewer perception becomes almost an art form and a medium in its own right. This is ultimately far more significant than the "vehicle" of painting, drawing, object-making etc. that may be chosen to orchestrate the viewer's experience of the work. The subtext of dealing with the problematics of painting and sculpture (even when the work is in a completely opposing medium) also seems to regularly provide recurrent common ground.

Irish artist, Caroline McCarthy is particularly involved with these questions, as graphically proved by the plastic detergent bottles whose bright plastic colors she painted over, in black, silver and grey, for her 2002 exhibition at the gallery. The display of these strange "electronic" devices provoked a visit from the NYPD who requested to see our "electronics retailer" permit! Wonderful confirmation of McCarthy's finely-tuned but extremely effective camouflaging technique. In Ten Years Hunting, we are presenting McCarthy's Mirage, a life-size projection of an illuminated drinks machine.

Stefan Sehler and Jason Glasser both make reverse paintings on glass/Plexiglas. While Sehler efficiently blurs the boundaries between figurative order and abstract chaos, and Glasser favors more painterly scenes of primitive science-fiction, both use the flattening effect of the reverse glass technique to deny viewer access to the real materiality of the paintings. This ironically and powerfully heightens the viewer's perception of this material presence, and by extension the subject matter it contains. Perceived materiality has a similarly strong role to play in the work of Beatriz Barral, whose 2003 exhibition Superaccesspace relied on monumental geometric mural painting to transform the gallery space. While we have reverted to smaller paintings for this exhibition, they can be seen as studies for Barral's transformations of the architectural environment with color, in which viewers found themselves physically "inside the painting".

References to more classical painting have a strong presence in the works presented by Samuel Rousseau, and Joshua Stern, though in these works, no paint is present. Rousseau's Electronic Tapestry, hijacks the kitsch tapestry interpretation of an old master portrait by replacing its eyes with moving pixilated ones on a hidden video screen. Stern's photographs of miniature model remakes of Vermeer interiors audaciously replace the characters with "expressionless" stick figures, rising to the challenge of injecting them with unexpectedly high levels of emotion.

Among the multitude of space program paraphernalia (and parody) generated by the practice of Steven Brower, versions of a scaled down spacesuit intended for a "child or chimp", activate a suspension of belief that heightens the viewer's involvement with both the object and its wider symbolism. Codes, keys and symbols that can effortlessly draw the spectator into intimate dialogue with a work of art, are often in operation here. Mike Rogers' 2002-5 photograph, TP, depicts a Teepee made from pages of the Wall Street Journal that is floating on the lake close to the house of Thomas Paine (T.P.). Tere Recarens fusion of her own life and art in diverse works is here represented by some of her childlike Panther and Monkey drawings, which hold their own complex, partly psychological symbolism, as indeed do the Green Flash ink drawings of Géraldine Pastor-Lloret, which return us to the ambiguity that seems dear to Parker's Box, wherein the material, possibly abstract qualities of medium can easily morph into something too real for comfort.

TEN YEARS HUNTING - [PART TWO]
Virginie Barré, John Bjerklie, Edith Dekyndt, Simon Faithfull, Tim Laun, Patrick Martinez, Bruno Peinado, Joyce Pensato, Fabien Verschaere, Gerard Williams.

It's a pleasure to be showing again so many works that we really admire, like Simon Faithfull's video, Escape Vehicle #6. A chair is attached to a meteorological balloon equipped with a camera filming the chair and beaming the images back to earth. The chair reaches the edge of space and disintegrates. The success of this unexpectedly moving work, relies on our identification with the chair through its strong association with the human body. New debate surrounds the work today due to a controversial remake of the piece, against the artist's wishes, for a Toshiba advertizing campaign. A different take on image rights has frequently hovered over Tim Laun's work, due to the artist's use of images of sports personalities. In his Favre Era Cyclorama Project Laun imagined over 200 TV monitors simultaneously showing all the games of the historic streak of the Green Bay Packer's cult quarterback, Brett Favre.

Bruno Peinado first came to prominence in part due to the Michelin corporation's vigorous objection to his controversial work, Black Bibendum. For the current exhibition we are presenting Big Bang from the 2009 solo show of that name. This will admittedly be a smaller version of the installation in which a tiny resin sculpture represents the explosive beginning of the Universe. The idea it projects seems to take over the gallery space and the world beyond. In Edith Dekyndt's often discreet works, modest materials and actions can similarly suggest parallels on a cosmic scale. In her video piece Martial M, the curious action of hands repetitively breaking apart and pushing together the particles of a lump of magnetized iron filings, easily provoke such metaphoric thoughts. Patrick Martinez often explores notions of matter and anti-matter in his diverse practices, including drawing, video, sculpture and installation. His recent laser-cut "drawings" use digital technology to burn away tiny slices of paper until intricate patterning is composed of almost more negative space (holes) than paper. Issues of cosmic metaphor, matter and anti-matter, even controversy surrounding the use of particular images are all evoked in Martinez' video piece, The Jesuses. Here, reproductions of crucifixion paintings become stills for an animation piece, in which the resulting dancelike movements make a work that is both beautiful and unsettling. Nudging the deeply familiar towards a new realm of inquiry that heightens our awareness of the physicality and presence of things is often a powerful tool in the hands of artists.

In his solo exhibition Fictional Neighbors in the spring of 2007, Gerard Williams presented a new series of actual "windows", dressed with fictional detail and inset in the gallery walls. Conditioned to know that space exists behind windows, the work created a strange awareness of phantom space. A similar trompe-l'oeil experience came from Virginie Barré's Bauhaus mannequins from her 2006 exhibition. The artist sets up an audacious dialogue between the respectively purist mindsets of Native American thought and Bauhaus architecture and design. Her installation included the uncanny presence of mannequins representing Native American figures wrapped in military blankets decorated with Bauhaus designs. John Bjerklie's form of fictional super-reality sees a kind of schizophrenic role play where two contrasting artists (Hothead and Coolhead) are in constant confrontation while making performances, paintings, sculpture and video in which they may also be the subject. Just as two of our Associate Directors moved on to greater things, this can happen to artists too, and this exhibition includes two artists whose work we no longer represent. As chance would have it, both are "figurative" painters, though those questions of matter and metaphor, irony and symbolism are never far away. We are delighted to be able to show once again the work of Joyce Pensato and Fabien Verschaere.

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