Visual Arts

The Center Gallery and the Lipani Gallery
Fordham University at Lincoln Center
October 1 – November 5, 2012
Opening October 4, 6–8

Press: New York Times, Thursday September 20, 2012

Writer Roberto Bolaño’s story, Gomez Palacio, describes a young poet sent to teach for the Mexican Arts Council in a desert town in the northern state of Durango.  Viewed on a map, the town is literally in the middle of nowhere, and the narrator, an exiled young writer from Pinochet’s Chile, is, at 23 years old, adrift and world-weary.  This is a story where very little happens, yet everything does.  Bolano describes a world where the mundane spawns the beautiful, where color is palpable, where an enigmatic emptiness pervades yet manages to provide strange respite.

Key colors in Gomez Palacio are a long, sky blue car, yellow hills described as pure light– and possibly eternity–, a night sky that descends like a gray wall, and a green, spectral light that appears when passing car headlights rake the desert floor at night. There is also mention of a sky that looks like a rockslide settling over the town.

Bolaño writes as an aggregator, gathering, collating and finally distilling factual information into lucid bits of confounding beauty. Things that shouldn’t add up, do, and much falls by the wayside, or, as the narrator says, is “unlikely, like most things in this story”.  Critic Pauline Font writes in her NY Times review that “the aura of mystery and melancholy Bolaño create(s) in Gomez Palacio)…is a sort of microclimate reminiscent of Kafka,…a weather that obliterate(s) everything outside the story”.

The artists in this exhibition all touch on aspects of the narrative in compelling ways, bringing visual impact and tangential experience to the space evoked by the written word. In a sense this exhibition is a visual collaboration with Roberto Bolaño, conjuring and collaging visual accomplices to his words.

ROCKSLIDE SKY / ARTISTS LIST

Justin Berry
Mary Carlson
Marsha Cottrell
Steve Di Bennedetto
Franklin Evans
Janet Gillespie
Jared Handelsman
Michelle Kloehn
Katerina Lanfranco
Joel Longenecker
Tom McGrath
Laura Newman
Morgan O’Hara
Ann Pibal
Marcy Rosenblat
Jackie Saccoccio

As soon as there was human experience, there was art. Modern architect Louis Khan articulated this in his statement that “Art, which was immediately felt, was the first word … the first utterance.” Prehistoric-man created cave paintings, if not to proclaim his existence then to document it. This impulse exists throughout art history and is as ever relevant in contemporary art.

Bringing together artists with disparate practices, Arbitrary Taxonomies presents inventories of invented, existing, and insular worlds through documentation, as with the photographs of Rory Mulligan and Mickey Smith; the ritual of Catherine Lee’s Mark Drawings series; by conflating fiction and reality in Dave Charlesworth’s videos; or when Nina Katchadourain creates works that adhere to an inner logic. Each of these artists work according to a set of systems that are entirely personal, yet are open to multiple readings.

Dave Charlesworth creates a cohesive narrative out of found images in his video works. His latest project attempts to create an arbitrary visual archive of all the terms in the glossary of the Pevsner Architectural Guides, publications from the mid-twentieth century that documented the architecture of the British Isles.

Nina Katchadourian takes the approach of a dedicated scientist to the everyday experience, making order out of a chaotic world with unexpected results such as creating genealogical histories for found objects. The collage Lake Michigan demonstrates this ability to create a new context for the familiar.

In an obsessive daily studio practice, Catherine Lee filled each square in a grid of varying size with a personal hieroglyph to produce The Mark Drawings and The Mark Paintings series of the 1970s. The repetitive imagery results in small variations that reveal a personal system of coding, a record of thought told through abstraction.

Following the lead of historical street photographers, Rory Mulligan uses an existing framework to insert a personal perspective in landscape and portraiture. His collection of images ruminate on gay identity, the suburbs, and everyday weirdness.

Mickey Smith investigates the aesthetics of libraries and their collections, such as the New York Public Library and the Federal Depository Libraries, among others. The works are documentation of a dying form of print that the artist has expressed no sentimental attachment to, but rather serve as an aesthetic material for what she describes as “conceptual language-based, anthropological works”.

For more information, please contact Bridget Donlon at bridget.donlon@gmail.com