Gallery SATORI is please to present Mastercraft, a two-person exhibition of new work by Ethan Greenbaum and David Scanavino. Mastercraft is a name used by several manufacturing companies and paradoxically implies both highly skilled craftsmanship and generic industrial production. Greenbaum and Scanavino’s work synthesizes these disparate spheres of the handmade and mass-produced in a series of discreet objects and architectural interventions.

In the front gallery, Greenbaum exhibits a series of trompe l’oeil photographs of concrete slabs printed on adhesive vinyl. The shaped works have been ripped out from larger photographs and stuck directly to the wall like subway advertisements. On the floor are Scanavino’s concrete sculptures that recreate the space underneath a trip rope in his studio. To create the work, the trip rope was submerged within a cast and later forcibly ripped out creating both an imprint of the rope and a jagged edge made from its removal. Both works create unexpected parallels between casting and photography, reality and simulation.

In the project space, the artists have collaborated to transform the entire room into a visual and linguistic excess. Greenbaum has covered the walls from floor to ceiling with a barrage of indecipherable words auto-generated in a page layout program. On top of these printouts, Scanavino has adhered grey monochrome rectangles of newspaper pulp made by reconstituting mulched local papers like the NY Post. The work collapses the days’ images and words into a unified mass adhered on top of the unreadable compilation of massive text. Within the cacophony of optical confusion and grammatical nonsense, the paper pulp pieces serve as ironic voids of meditative rest.

Ethan Greenbaum is a New York based artist. He graduated with an MFA from Yale in 2005. Selected exhibition venues include Anna Kustera, NY, Circus Gallery, LA, Shenghua Arts Center, Nanjing and Gallery SATORI, NY. He has an upcoming solo show in 2010 at The Suburban, Chicago. He is also an editor at the online arts journal, thehighlights.org.

David Scanavino is a New York based artist and earned his MFA from Yale in 2003. He has exhibited widely in venues including Gavin Brown Enterprises, NY (where he co-curated NeoCon with Mathew Cerletty), Bellwether, NY and Loop-Raum für Aktuelle Kunst, Berlin. He had his first solo show last fall at Klaus Von Nichtssagend, Brooklyn and will represent them in an upcoming solo show at NADA Art Fair in Miami, 2009.