Curated in collaboration with Daniel Creahan
Featuring works by Daniel Creahan, Reece Cox, Sophie Kitching, Quentin Lefranc
67, Lower East Side, New York, 2016
The act of placing works in a space is in part rooted in a sense of modularity, of working with and against a sense of the site as grid, as a system of hard measurements and numbers, and the operations that ultimately reinterpret or alter the experience of both site and object as a result. The gallery grid, the spatial dimensions of the site remain an open framework where the objects on view can reshape or re-plot the space as both a site of visual and spatial configurations. Proof of Concept explores these concepts of function and space in relation to the gallery site.
The gallery is capable of acting on the objects within it, providing a framework for viewing that turns them into sources of contemplation and markers of space and time. By contrast, the works themselves function in relation to the gallery’s measurements and physical bounds; animating or tempering various features and geometries through their placement. The objects on view in this exhibition map themselves over the gallery’s floor plan, and by turn over the materiality and historical contexts that they each engage with inside the gallery context. These are objects that put themselves into play with the passage of time and space, tracing time, and in some cases, visitor’s engagements in the space.
At the center of the show is Quentin Lefranc’s Pente Grammai (2016), which is laid out as a board game on the floor of the space, with artists, curators, or other parties involved in the exhibition taking on roles as the players. Presenting a series of rules to the production of the board, Lefranc’s piece allows these actors to compose the board through their competition, assembling the work’s pieces based on their response to each others’ strategies.
By similar turns, the works on the surrounding walls operate on the space around themselves. Sophie Kitching’s series of modular paintings Untitled (Veranda) (2016), shown both on the walls and on the floor, uses corrugated plastic to both suspend paint in a translucent ground, while its ridged surface marks the site around it with an underlying geometric awareness, both consolidating acts of measurement and de-programming them through the painterly gestures that cover their surface.
By contrast, Daniel Creahan’s 4 panel configure deck-a-floor (after Palermo) (2016) playfully rewrites the serial processes of minimalism through readymade outdoor deck paneling systems, reducing their historical antecedents to an industrial and hard-edged materiality. Both these aspects are echoed in Reece Cox’s System1 (2016), which apply a sense of craft-based processes to modern materials; latticed nylon fabrics and printed images that emphasize a sense of geometry, albeit one that is sagging by dint of its material construction.
At its core, Proof of Concept drives an inquiry at how context can emerge from this network of spatial and visual correlations, how space is generated and re-formed from the points of emphasis that the site and its objects produce.
