Month: March 2008

Party Friday in New York!


V1 Gallery is showing Peter Funch’s Babel Tales at the first Volta NY
art fair.
To celebrate this, we are hosting a party with friends and fiends at
NYC’s answer to “Skipper Bodega”.
So join us at Puffy’s Tavern on Friday 28th from 23.00. Beers, rock
and the one of the most eclectic DJ line ups we have ever assembled
for a beef night.
We hope to see you.

Mike Quinn


New York (March 25, 2008) – Perry Rubenstein Gallery is pleased to present multi-media artist Mike Quinn’s solo exhibition in the 534 West 24th Street gallery space.

The exhibition will feature a site-specific installation, Keeping Up Appearances Can Be A Drag, which graphs the force of a basketball falling to earth against the force of gravity. The gravity line (represented by a hundreds of USA Gold Cigarette packs) is the constant whose omnipresence is the inescapable, the invariable; these are the rules by which every game is played. The fall of the ball or “drag force line” is represented by faux gold varsity pins that the artist has transformed by enscrawling the prescription code for a common anti-depressant on top of their gleaming veneer. The work deals with an object falling and the forces, which hinders it from staying up (gravity and drag), it appears as a positive line when graphed. Pharmaceutical medication and over the counter self-medication can be taken in order to maintain the appearance of happiness; losing can be made to look like winning.

Winning Is Good (for mom) and Losing Is Good For You (for me) approaches the rational side of win and loss. The “win” piece maps out the velocity of a ball in flight against free throw shooters’ head; the “loss” work maps the same for a missed shot. The rational aspects of the win look cold, forced and distant while the chaos and unpredictability of the loss piece looks more engaging and honest and welcoming. The win begins to look forced in that it represents the idea of the fleeting moment of victory; it is the loss– the struggle to move forward without the hope of moving up– that can be counted on.

Quinn received a B.F.A. in painting from NYU in 2000. He grew up in Hartford, CT and now lives and works in New York. This exhibition is Quinn’s first with Perry Rubenstein.

Concurrently on view at the gallery’s 23rd Street space through March 29th is Ry Fyan: I Can Give You What You Want. On April 12th, the 23rd Street gallery will reopen with Berlin-based artist Dennis Rudolph’s New York solo debut, titled: THE HOLY WAR, CHAPTER I: Sacrifice of Youth.

Perry Rubenstein

Visual Arts Division



Visual Arts Division
First-Year MFA Show

Opening Reception: Friday, April 4, 5pm-8pm

Exhibition Days and Times:
Saturday, April 5 – Sunday, April 6, 11am-4pm,
Thursday, April 10 – Friday, April 11, 2pm-7pm
Sat. April 12 – Sun. April 13 11am-4pm

Join us for open studios following the closing of the exhibition on April 13th.

PICTURE ID IS REQUIRED FOR ENTRANCE TO BUILDING

Location:
The Nash Building
3280 Broadway @ 132nd Street, 5th Floor

Naoya Hatakeyama



Naoya Hatakeyama
“Ciel Tombé”

Taka Ishii Gallery is pleased to announce our fourth solo exhibition with Naoya Hatakeyama.
For this exhibition the gallery will present, approximately 15 photographs from Hatakeyama’s
recent “Ciel Tombé” series,photographed in Paris, 2007.

In Europe, there are cities that quarried stone directly below an urban area to construct
the city itself. Among such cities, Paris was exceptional for undergoing massive digging.
Due to continuous digging from the Middle Ages to modern times, Paris’s underground is full
of holes to such an extent as to be comparable to Gruyère cheese. In fact, catacombs
(underground cemeteries) photographed by Nadar in the nineteenth century and now famous as
tourist spots were created using the portions of the old quarries.
Hatakeyama, who once wrote in his artist book “Lime Works” that “Mines and cities are
like the negative and positive of a single photograph,” noticed that similar structures
unfolded vertically in modern Paris and visited the remains of several underground quarries
(mostly made of lime stone) with the cooperation of Inspection Générale des Carrières.

“Ciel Tombé” is a term referring to a situation in which the ceilings of the subterranean
quarry remains have tumbled down. (A direct translation is “fallen sky.”) As abandoning
these sites would eventually cause harmful effects towards over-ground construction,
through consolidation work was conducted by the Inspectorate during the twentieth century.
Yet some “Ciel Tombé’s were left abandoned in a former quarry called “la Brasserie.”
Lying 17 meters underground of the Bois de Vincennes, on the eastern end of Paris, the
over-ground has only forest land and no buildings. No one knows exactly when the “sky fell
down.”

Ciel Tombé
Newton’s apple stopped as it fell on the ground but this is not the end point of gravity.
The earth’s surface is merely a hand held out in the middle of a fall and gravity penetrates
this, leading further down towards the center of the earth.
It is said that in the ancient times, there were people who worried that the sky they looked up
to would fall some day. Though it is difficult for us living in an age of science to imagine
the view of “the sky falling down,” if we consider this as meaning that “the sky” is a place
above us resisting gravity, we can imagine the anxiety of ancient people. The blue sky above
was probably not an “empty sky” but a “place” for them.
And the sky fell down. It penetrated vertically through cities, architecture and our bodies,
falling underground. The sky has now become an ancient layer of earth permeating below the
city we live.

Naoya Hatakeyama

Taka Ishii Gallery