Art in General is pleased to present Joyce Kim and Carlos Roque’s Mostly Shadows. This first-time collaboration is presented in Art in General’s Storefront Project Space as the second Intersections exhibition. Intended to interrogate the nature, forms and results of collaborative processes both within the field of art and in interdisciplinary contexts, Intersections is an experimental platform for new and ongoing collaborative projects. Mostly Shadows represents a coming-together of two artists, Kim and Roque with significantly different practices that explore the potential of cross-disciplinary exchange.

Joyce Kim’s work engages with the history of painting and its status within current artistic practice. Grappling with subjects such as the legacy of Modernism and the language of abstraction, her approach shifts deftly between the materiality of painting and consideration of text as a way to experience the medium. Metaphorical references to the body run throughout her work in the form of poured films of plasticized paint or sheets of leather that stand in as skin-like surrogates for the canvas. Taken in combination with her inclusion of fictional texts evoking the interiority of the painting process, she brings new focus to both the physicality of the medium and the real and imagined space of the artist’s studio. Further complicated by wry quotations of prominent painting styles (from Klein to Kippenberger), her work takes the form of propositions for considering painting’s enduring theoretical relevance, viewing painting’s history of self-doubt and systematic breakdowns as a catalyst for its own recuperation.

Originally trained as a painter, Carlos Roque’s wide-ranging practice includes found-object assemblage, video and multi-media installation, electro-kinetic sound sculptures, paintings and drawings. Roque explores the texture of urban culture with particular attention to the acoustic impact and visual influence of indie or underground movements. Employing a process of sifting through materials and consciously selecting elements, Roque often combines visually appealing guitars, mixing boards, distortion pedals and turntables in his assemblage; as well as highways, skylines, and graffiti in his two-dimensional work. Roque’s practice incorporates elements of chance and experimentation in his sculptural and performative work: machines become active performers, bending the structure of sounds through their individual imperfections layered on top of each other to fill space, addressing the viewer as much through sheer physicality as musical presence.

In Mostly Shadows, Kim and Roque take the notion of “the end”–the recurrent expiration of painting and the literal end of a performance–as the focal point for their collaboration. The artists have arrived to the scene of painting not at the height of the medium, but just as the music has faded and the curtain appears to be closing. Investigating the post-performance stage as a platform for exploring this idea, the artists have created an installation that layers painting, sound, and the suggestive traces of unseen performers with the material remains of an actual performance, by Katharina Stenbeck and Carlos Roque, which will take place on the opening night of the exhibition.

Carlos Roque is a Portuguese artist who lives and works in New York and Lisbon. Roque obtained a degree in painting at the University of Lisbon in 1994 and was a member of the Tone Scientists collective art and music project through 2002. Roque has been showing internationally since the mid-1990s in locations including Lisbon, Madrid, New York and Paris. His work has been included in public art collections such as the Centro de Arte Moderna / José de Azevedo Perdigão, The Serralves Contemporary Art Museum, and the Pedro Cabrita Reis Art Collection and was awarded a Gulbenkian and Luso-American Foundation fellowship in 2004. A former resident artist at both the International Studio and Curatorial Program and Forever And Today in New York, Roque has been featured in Artforum.com and The New Yorker among other international publications.

Joyce Kim lives and works in New York. She received an M.A. from New York University and has had solo exhibitions at locations including Artists’ Space, NY; SAKS Galerie, Geneva, Switzerland; The Center for Contemporary Non-Objective Art, Brussels, Belgium; Livingroom D Lyx, Malmo, Sweden; and Thierry Goldberg Projects, NY. She has participated in group exhibitions at The Slought Foundation, Philadelphia; Thierry Goldberg Projects, NY, Frederieke Taylor Gallery, NY; Thrust Projects, NY; Southfirst, Brooklyn; Peres Project, Los Angeles; and Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery, NY. She is a recipient of The Pollock Krasner Foundation grant and The John Anson Kitteredge Fund award, was a resident at The Marie Walsh Sharpe Foundation in 2008, and has been featured in publications including The Brooklyn Rail, Modern Painters, and Flash Art International.