BE THEREEpileptic Seizure ComparisonPresented by Greene Naftali November 30, 2007- January 5, 2008Jutta Koether, Daniel Pflumm, Jason Rhoades, Paul Sharits
Jason Rhoades’ installations provide a powerful corollary to Sharits’ film work. Where Sharits is tightly structured and medium-specific, Rhoades embodies the monstrous mayhem of our commercial reality as a defamilarizing imposition on the individual psyche. His sprawling constructions co-opt the world of “things” into a subjective reordering, which both undermines and overloads the possibility for engagement and with a sophisticated concern for color, density, and luminosity. From his “Meccatuna” project, we will exhibit Shelf (Love Pocket), a sculpture stocked with brightly colored neon texts of female genitalia—“Bearded Taco,” “No No,” “Muffin Love”— and ceramic donkey carts layered one atop another and a “MeccaVulva” chrome corner piece. The Berlin-based artist Daniel Pflumm has worked directly with commercial media, delving into the schizophrenic vocabulary of television advertising and corporate branding (Ikea , A + P, Rite Aid, Dannon). Devoid of all text, his light-box corporate logos become ominous formal aberrations of icons, recoding abstraction as the subliminal administration of consciousness. Jutta Koether is a central figure in the Cologne and New York art scene. We will exhibit works from her “hysteric” series of ecstatic portrait paintings. Drawing from the visual tropes of “visionary art,” Koether’s paintings depict a psychological state in transition from inner consciousness to external presence, as the emotional energy of this transformation radiates throughout the canvases. The irony is the hagiographic quality of these “hysterical” depictions; Koether wedges open a space where the liberating potential of spirituality can reinform the historically marginalized perception of hysteria. Testing the material limits of their historical moment in painting, these “hysterics” are decidedly Pop, saturated with the DayGlo fluorescence and iridescent metallics of the late 80s-early 90s moment. We will also present an installation of fine-line abstract drawings by Paul Sharits. This aspect of his work has rarely been shown and elaborates Sharits’ conceptual concerns with the relationship between the visual and the psychological. Like an EEG reading, the lines in Sharits drawings “move” across the page according to emotional whims, approaching violent peaks and calligraphic passages, at points coalescing into words and images.
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