Elizabeth Dee Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of work by Mai Braun, Kori Newkirk, Gail Thacker, and Kerry Tribe organized by Jenny Moore, the gallery’s newly appointed Director. The exhibition will open Saturday, January 6th with a reception for the artists from 6-8pm.
Material for the Making brings together a selection of works that employ singular materials and medium specific devices for investigations into form, the translation of memory, and the reinterpretation of images and events. A commitment to materiality and an emphasis on tactility pervades much of the work presented in the front room of the gallery, while the back room is devoted to a filmic exploration of the seemingly inherent futility in objectively depicting one’s subjective reality. Gathered together, these works resist definitive statements about past or present and operate in an open-ended dialogue inflected with contingency and catalyst.
Mai Braun’s sculptures strike a delicate balance between form and formlessness, abstraction and representation. Described as experiments in “a test-lab for proto-formalist sculpture,” the work is made from a mixture of found materials—cardboard boxes, newspaper—and building supplies—tape, wood, and length of tubing—with evident immediacy and economy of means. Her recent work locates particular images of destruction as points of departure for the making of new three-dimensional objects. The resultant sculpture takes on a life of its own through the process of its making and the formal accidents that happen along the way, distorting its referent while creating a symbiotic relationship between the image that inspired it and the form that follows after.
Mai Braun is a Frankfurt based artist whose work has recently been shown at Feature, Inc., Ampersand International Arts, San Francisco, and Kluuvi Galleria, Helsinki. She has had solo exhibitions at the Chinati Foundation, Marfa, TX and Brooklyn Fire Proof.
In Kori Newkirk’s pomade paintings, personal history, identity politics, and formal elegance all converge on the gallery walls. Immediately identifiable by its scent, Newkirk’s medium resists further specificity as it becomes the means for the creation of manifestly present yet materially ephemeral depictions of childhood memories and personal signifiers. For this exhibition, Newkirk will resuscitate the shape that appeared in his first pomade paintings—a snowflake. Rendered in black, in homage of their final appearance, the snowflakes will flutter and fall across the gallery walls as markers of a presence already gone.
Kori Newkirk lives and works in Los Angeles. His work is currently included in the traveling exhibitions Uncertain States of America and Landscape Confection and has recently been featured in the Dakar Biennial 7, the Whitney Biennial 2006: Day for Night and the California Biennial. He has had solo exhibitions at the MCA San Diego, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Cleveland, The Fabric Workshop, Philadelphia, and the Henry Art Gallery, Seattle. He is represented by The Project, New York and Los Angeles.
Gail Thacker’s work explores the slippery role that photography plays in the narratives we construct about and around our lives. Photographs have the striking capacity to both support and distort the memories we carry of formative events. Acknowledging this contradiction, Thacker undermines the mimetic stability of the photographic image through a distinct “curing” process—a coating of the unfixed Polaroid surface with a range of substances that are left to fester and mold. With time, the images warp, disintegrate, and dissolve into silvery surfaces and obscured forms, engendering a physical and visual correlation to the instability of the photographic marker. In Shaving Cream Series (1997), comprised of over 50 Polaroid photographs, Thacker captures performance artist Rafael Sanchez covered in shaving cream, reveling in a surrealist setting composed of absurdist props constructed by both artists. Describing Thacker’s process as an “intervention in the ‘pataphysical sense,” Carol Schwarzman elucidates a core aspect of Thacker’s practice: “while metaphysics is the anti of simulation (opposing fantasy with ever more reality), ‘pataphysics is the ante of simulation (opposing fantasy with ever more fantasy).”
Gail Thacker is a New York based artist whose work will be included in the upcoming exhibition Blow Both of Us at Participant Inc. Her photographs have been exhibited at the June Bateman Gallery, New York, White Box, New York, and The Pat Hearn Gallery, Boston, and are featured in the Taschen publication The Polaroid Book, a survey of the Polaroid Company’s photographic collection. Affiliated with the “Boston School” of photography, her work has recently been historicized and recontextualized in light of her influential use of Polaroid 665 film and unique processing method.
Kerry Tribe employs the mediums of film and video for her extended exploration into perception, coincidence, and the phenomenology of memory. In Near Miss (2005), the second in a trilogy of related works, Tribe attempts to recreate the specific experience of an undocumented event witnessed only by the artist more than a decade ago. Over the course of three nearly identical “cinematic” takes, Tribe presents what appears to be a car’s spinout in a snowstorm. Each take is accompanied by a unique soundtrack, which slightly alters the perception and experience of the event as it unfolds. Two other components—a photograph of the car used in the production and an interpretive text of the event written by one of the film’s crew—further relate the distance between the real and the represented that can never be reconciled.
Kerry Tribe’s work has recently been exhibited at the Gagosian Gallery, Berlin as part of the 4th Berlin Biennial and in Down by Law, organized by the Wrong Gallery with Cecilia Alemani and Jenny Moore as part of the Whitney Biennial 2006: Day for Night. She has had solo exhibitions at the Galerie Maisonneuve, Paris, Southern Exposure, San Francisco, and LACE, Los Angeles. She lives and works in Los Angeles and Berlin.