Jack Chiles Gallery
208 Bowery
East Village / Lower East Side
April 28 - May 27, 2012
Reception: Saturday, April 28, 6 - 9 PM
Web Site
Jack Chiles presents “Take It With You,” an exhibition of works by Anne Libby, Andrew Ross, and Peter Wilson. The three artists work in vastly distinct media towards individual approaches to narrative and concept. Through invention and personal systems of production, the artists create objects that refer back to a performance of problematic intentions. Pushing toward likely breaking points, what is left is a sense that what happens today may not sustain its own proposition, and what’s left for tomorrow is a starting point from which to reconsider and react.
Anne Libby undertakes a series of paintings starting with her idea of a prototypical abstraction. Painting through porous burlap, a material known for its distinct tactility, she makes use of an ‘auto-detail’. She then stretches, crops and scales these images and methodically remakes them. Her color is sourced from the original Liquitex® BASICS line of paint (promoted as the most fundamental and inexpensive), which directly reflect an Abstract Expressionist palette designated by the Pantone Corporation. Libby playfully entertains the notion that a prescribed, commercial palette can engender a tradition of urgency. In series, her controlled expressions aspire to tests of endurance and reliability.
Andrew Ross’s sculptures are made using an array of idiosyncratic casting and building processes. Including intentional challenges in his way of depicting, his illustrative work slips away from its references and imagery.The result is a type of monument with vandalism built-in. Ross alters and critiques the settings surrounding his work by erecting in the room, sculptures that seem too large, heavy, fragile, loud, or inconclusive to enter it. He creates a space of mimetic ambiguity, leaving slapstick and pragmatics as the outlet for interpretation.
Peter Wilson formulates a new medium from the vestiges of an outmoded commercial practice, the Storyboard. Traditionally, made of sequential sketches for narrative production, the storyboard’s character is one of the eternally unfinished. Acting as a narrator of sorts across a range of quasi-social sketches, Wilson insinuates story, schematics, and a variety of invented processes and materials to find traction within storyboarding’s porous definitions. His productions ultimately find their own root internally, unfolding as humorous functions of their proximate parts and arriving as fully formed ‘pre-visualizations’.