Don't Make a Scene
February 7th - March 12th
11 solo exhibitions
"Don't Make a Scene" is comprised of 4-day solo presentations, running from February 7 through March 12, at Kai Matsumiya. There will be a total of 11 solo exhibitions in the second and third galleries. The first gallery will remain empty. Kai Matsumiya will remain open seven days a week between 12 – 6 during the course of Don’t Make a Scene.
On one hand, the colloquialism “Don’t Make a Scene” is used by the parent to the bratty child, or the boyfriend or girlfriend to their respective partners. The rationale prohibits expected behaviors within certain environments. On the other hand, “Don’t make a Scene” is a tongue-in-cheek reference to the decline of scenes in general due to present changing economic, social, technological, and cultural circumstances. Many of such rationalizations are often dependent on a number of psychological and generational dispositions and experiences.
Some may declare that “a scene is dead”; “the scene is passé”; “it’s all about the scene”; "it's just part of the scene"; the scene has mutated into a type of insincere “branding” strategy driven by suspect orientations; the scene may in fact represent the virtuous exemplification of certain communities where the manifested result was never intended or witted. The scene could be a glorious part of the scenery, but it may not be wise to be a scenester.
And, in another way, maybe it doesn’t have to be so serious. The formulaic gallery opening itself introduces the scene. Throughout Don’t Make a Scene we may forego the opening in favor of a closing or a middling. The show may end when it all begins, or it may somehow remain in the middle.
Continuing Philip Metten’s emphasis on the vacant show which took place last December in “153.Stanton”, Rainer Ganahl’s investigations into the context of the institutional worlds of artists in “S/L” previously, and Lucky DeBellevue’s founding of the now 55 member strong Foundation Barbin which filled the space to its absolute limitations and concludes Friday, February 5th, Gallery 1 will remain a space to take a break from it all. The first space will also be active as it will be used for temporary storage during the rapid installation/de-installation cycle that will ensue, as we simply have no room left at the gallery.
Don’t Make a Scene at Kai Matsumiya begins with ephemeral solo openings by Sam Gordon and Jake Ewert, and closings with Walter Robinson and Graham Durward. More solo shows will be presented as parts of "Don't Make a Scene" TBD in the coming weeks.
Presenting:
SAM GORDON AND JAKE EWERT
Sunday, February 7th - Thursday, February 11th : Galleries 2 and 3
Opening Reception: Sunday, February 7th, 5-7pm
and
WALTER ROBINSON and GRAHAM DURWARD
Saturday, February 13th - Wednesday , February 17th
Closing Reception: Wednesday, February 17th, 6-8 pm
Sam Gordon
A selection of works on paper from various periods by the artist, (1996-2016) paired with folk art, thrift store finds and souvenirs from abroad from Gordon's personal collection. This exhibition functions in conjunction with World Made By Hand at Andrew Edlin Gallery, Feb 7th- March 19th which was organized in cooperation with the artist.
Sam Gordon is an artist and curator living in Brooklyn. From 1997 through 2013 Gordon's painting, drawing, photography, and video work was regularly presented in numerous solo and group exhibitions at Feature Inc. His work is included in the collections of the Museum Of Modern Art, New York and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN. Gordon's recent curatorial projects include Contemporary Poetry, for NADA New York 2014, PURPLE STATES with Andrew Edlin Gallery, 2014, and #FFFF at White Columns, 2015. Most recently Gordon was a visiting professor at the California Institute for the Arts in January 2016.
Jake Ewert – “Paintings”
Working with the architecture of the gallery, Jake Ewert creates paintings in response to the space, and is an artist living and working in Queens.
Walter Robinson
So guys what's your agenda? We're going to stick to our goals and follow our nutrition plans and eat healthy, right? Fuel up for a wintry day with some egg oatmeal with blueberries and chopped walnuts, or a wholesome green salad with chopped carrot, cucumber and tomato. Never underestimate the deliciousness of simplicity. A person could easily take the day off and binge on blockbuster movies in Times Square, but if you have big plans for your health and wellness, you won't reach them by slacking off. It's not easy to be driven by passion. It's exhausting and can feel hopeless. But who wants to live life on autopilot? How can you miss the chance to experience the immense joy that comes from knowing you've touched someone else's vital center? I struggle to inspire people to change their outlook and create paths to freedom. Painting has been good to me, and I would love to pay this forward and show people how they too can achieve happiness and peace and begin living their own lives of freedom. It's the most fulfilling thing in the world, and the time to start is now.
Graham Durward
After all, whose tongue is it anyway?
I was looking through some paintings in the studio, as I often do in order to "make sense" .When did I do these? oh yes not so long ago perhaps, that one only last week? I rarely work on "shows" , so many artists do these days .I prefer a circuitous route to whatever. I like to catch myself unawares and believe in poetry.
Oh, there’s one and there’s another they seem to relate! Was I feeling the same that day as I was just then? There is sometimes a strange continuity to what can randomly occur! Or perhaps not, given ones essential being. So, having corralled paintings from far corners of my studio what do they mean to me now?
Do I think this?. I was trying to paint something that described the sensation of a deep kiss. A "French Kiss" in which a "desiring tongue discovers another tongue as equally desiring,between lips. And, the sensation of physical abandonment is sensed in the other which opens out into a liquid void of disembodied pleasure."
Was I attempting to show this from the outside looking in or from the inside looking out?
Its a little like kissing, lips meet, the tongue finds its way, there is an initial understanding, a relenting,a reciprocation. Its just that one has to be both sometimes. There will be four or five paintings.
Meredyth Sparks
My layered collages, paintings and sculptures are uncanny formalist inventions existing somewhere between figuration and abstraction. Working within both analog and digital processes, my work is at once illusory and concrete, often combining found imagery --- whether mundane or iconic --- in conjunction with more ephemeral matter, such as light and shadow. Central to my process is the meticulous cutting away from and reconstruction of a found image, a term I call “extraction.” By foregrounding the gesture of the cut, “extraction” negotiates the space between the material and the abstract and that which is perceived and which is implied.
For Don’t Make a Scene I will show new sculptural pieces whose structural bases are made from pre-existing materials, such as stretcher bars and “door snakes.” I use these found objects as templates of a sort, taken out of their usual function and reconfigured into new forms. These sculptures can be viewed as abstracted figures or a kind of imprecise portraiture.
Patrick Bradley
I did not set out to be a specific type of artist. I do what feels natural and moving to me. I grew up doing carpentry work and studying architecture. I also work as a visual designer, using the principals of architecture to create virtual spaces on the internet.
The work I’m currently producing uses common tools of carpentry, such as various saws, sandpapers, joint compounds, epoxies, wood fillers, routers and drills to name a few. I start with found wood and then work into it, often beginning by sawing lines into the wood. From there I may carve out certain areas to further develop the compositions. Some of the pieces are more raw and textural; others more polished, using fillers and surfacing materials and pigments.
Compositions draw on numerous sources, usually with architectural landscapes in mind. Architectural drafting imagery and techniques often come into play, and also photography. I sometimes photograph my work table as I’m working and use the images as a basis for the next piece. Other compositions just happen by chance. These works could easily be construed simply as coming out of a history of painting.
By showing work in“don’t make a scene” it is my intention to create a conversation around the idea of opposites: larger more formal work in a smaller more informal context. The rough nature of the gallery space also alludes to the rough nature of the work, and its deeper origins of architecture, carpentry and sculpture.
Christopher Schade and Tracy Molis
Thursday, February 25th to Monday, February 29th
Middling Reception: Saturday, February 27th (6-8pm)
Afterparty: Subject Bar (8:30 pm at 188 Suffolk Street)
*** the show is 4 days long and we'll be open 7 days a week (12-6 pm)
Tracy Molis
Eyes stand in the way
Of the light that passes
Through the back of heads
Tracy Molis presents two paintings of duplicated stone subjects, in this iteration leaving the exposures in each one amplified, distorted or dimmed. Seated as they are, perpetually, in the back of a flickering theater, witnessing their father's film--for the 50th time, secretly proud--they ask, "Like T. Swift and '89, should he really have not trademarked '73?"
Christopher Schade
Plein Air and Abstracted Landscapes (Version 2)
Plein air painting (painting from observation in the landscape) is an approach to painting that was established by the French Barbizon School painters in the 1830’s. Christopher Schade has been making small, quick observational paintings in this way since 1997. These images are then transformed in his studio into larger works that utilize a varied grammar of painting to explore states of perceptual and psychological dissonance. By subverting pictorial expectations through creating contradictory understandings of the space, Schade is investigating the mental state of holding conflicting beliefs simultaneously. The Plein Air works, anchored in observation, have served as a perceptual ground to the Abstracted Landscapes and the Abstracted Landscapes have led Schade to search out spaces of ambiguity for subjects in the world. Schade is showing both the Plein Air and the Abstracted works together to explore this relationship.
Craig Kalpakjian
Wednesday, March 2nd to Sunday, March 6th
Closing Reception: Sunday, March 6th (6-8pm)
The foundational gesture of systems theory is to distinguish an inside (the system) from an outside (the environment).
'Gentlemen' he would say, 'collect your thoughts and enter into yourselves. We are not at all concerned now with anything external, but only with ourselves.' And, just as he requested, his listeners really seemed to be concentrating upon themselves. Some of them shifted their position and sat up straight, while others slumped with downcast eyes. But it was obvious that they were all waiting with great suspense for what was supposed to come next. Then he would continue: 'Gentlemen, think about the wall.' And as I saw, they really did think about the wall, and everyone seemed able to do so with success. 'Have you thought about the wall?' he would ask. 'Now, gentlemen, think about whoever it was that thought about the wall.' The obvious confusion and embarrassment provoked by this request was extraordinary. In fact, many of the listeners seemed quite unable to discover anywhere whoever it was that had thought about the wall.
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Lisa Blas "After Lost Space(s)"
Tuesday, March 8th to Saturday, March 12th
Closing Reception: Saturday, March 12th (6-8pm)
After lost space(s) by Lisa Blas is a project in collage and an installation of painted baseboards and door frames within the three gallery spaces at Kai Matsumiya Gallery. The work takes its inspiration from Guy Mees, Corita Kent, and nineteenth century photographers such as Adolphe Braun, Anna Atkins and William Henry Fox Talbot, and sets the stage where color, activism and the study of botanical specimens meet one another in collage and painting. Constructed on the axis of Guy Mees’s ephemeral works on paper and painting of architectural borders, Verloren ruimte (lost space), the gallery spaces at Kai Matsumiya and their “framing” are activated, along with references to geographical spaces that have disappeared. Typographical fields and images on vellum are united via horizontal and vertical architectural fragments of color, visible from room to room. The highlighting of painted baseboards and door frames functions like a pause, a comma, where the jagged and abrupt changes in the gallery floor plan are pronounced and echoed throughout the content of the collages themselves.