Casey Kaplan is pleased to announce a new and important divergence from the gallery’s usual program. On October 18th the gallery will open three simultaneous solo exhibitions by the artists: Sarah Dornner, Garth Weiser, and Davis Rhodes. These exhibitions demonstrate the gallery’s desire to highlight three young artists living and working in New York City who have all recently graduated from local art schools.

SARAH DORNNER GALLERY I

Casey Kaplan is pleased to announce the first solo exhibition of artist, Sarah Dornner. By appropriating technologies of representation from the sciences, architecture, and the commercial arts and combining the dimensional properties of video, photography, sculpture, and drawing, Sarah Dornner investigates the ways in which cultural and social constructs inform individual perceptions of space. This exhibition will show two artworks in Gallery I, Catwalk a white, spiral staircase and Hedge, a graphic photograph of a shrub.

Dominating in scale, Catwalk is determined by a mathematical equation. Each unattainable step is 10% smaller than the one that came before it, creating a spiral that continues to infinity. Dornner views this abstraction in cinematic terms through films such as Ziegfeld Girl, 1941 – the spiral staircase from the set is an inspiration for this piece. In Ziegfeld Girl, the Busby Berkeley musical segments break the rules of continuity and result in an impossible space. Viewers are presented with interspersed voids and camera angles that compress the characters into graphic forms. Dornner’s Catwalk distorts perception in a similar way, forcing a dreamlike perspective with infinite space onto a real, architectural structure.

Opposing the monochromatic staircase is the photograph Hedge. The plant depicted is a privet, used mainly for privacy hedging and commonly found in suburban yards. Dornner implements a technique that heightens the gradation of color and creates a mysterious, never-ending abyss. The result is an inert simulacrum of the once organic form.

In the juxtaposition, Dornner contrasts the two artworks dimensionality and the unrevealing, domestic language of the shrub with the fantastic space of the sculpture. Central to her practice, Catwalk and Hedge are analytic abstractions that confound spatial logic.

Sarah Dornner is a Master of Fine Arts graduate from Yale University School of Art.