Roebling Hall in conjunction with Nicholas Robinson Gallery are pleased to present Ray Smith in RAYS MITH, his first New York solo exhibition in five years and the first exhibition following the publication of his monograph and recent Retrospective Exhibitions in Europe and Texas.

For this occasion Smith has returned to the intimate realm of his naturalist Tex-Mex mythology; recounting personal mythologies which are arguably the pillars of his existence: women, family, desire, politics, the carnivalesque culture of rodeo, eroticism, mockery and the worship of nature’s magic and mystery. These new paintings and drawings continue the path explored by his solo shows at Akira Ikeda Gallery (Berlín) and Joan Prats (Barcelona), in which an onerous aesthetic and the interplay of a decisive stroke signal the unreality of the tale. The landscape converses with what is private and attached to the subject’s experience; where dream, nightmare, or the phantasmal realm of memory converse with reality. This is a body of work in which innumerable drawings take an enlivened look at amusement, coquetry and laughter while the inherent grandiloquence and majesty of the work comment on its internal splendor, the knowledge of its gesture, and its own pleasure, ultimately rendering Smith a master of his mark.

In the Project Room Roebling Hall is pleased to present “The Corner of Your Eye”, Rebecca Horne’s first solo exhibition in New York City. At first glance, Rebecca Horne’s pictures appear as elegant quotidian scenes or still-lifes of familiar objects. The viewer who too briskly takes in the scene, automatically completing the image in their mind or quickly categorizing it, is lulled into thinking they have fully perceived the image. Peering closer however, the viewer is often surprised to find the photographs reveal themselves to be less ordinary.

Horne accomplishes these twists in the photos with a playful wit, slyly employing a mix of punctured routine expectations and improbable events. She devises ephemeral sculptures comprised of raw elements – such as salt, ice, water or ink that coax the unreliability of the photographic image to the fore. By freely mixing objects and their operations to confuse scale or perform little transubstantiations, Horne’s photographs function as a record of these performative phenomena.

Historically “Nature Morte” operates as a Memento Mori, piercing the illusion of a replete life with reminders of mortality. Horne peels back the alternate veil of illusion, the illusion that still-life is inanimate. Here we glimpse the liminal moment where the image comes to life, quietly slipping from the constraints of logic, revealing the simultaneity of things seen and those that go unseen.