Saturday, October 20, 2012

Amanda Friedman @ Eli Ping Gallery


Amanda Friedman @
Eli Ping Gallery
131 Eldridge Street
New York, NY 10003


Opening Reception:  Sunday, October 21, 2012, 6:00 PM









RELEASE

    I begin on the floor. I emphasize the imperfect ripples of the surface landscape and layer breath, trying to create oneness, absorbing a felt shape. I activate and float the paper, allowing it to explore negative space. Scale, contour, movement stages, capture, and allow a battleground. I question linear time.
    Feelings are weighty, textured; they hang in the atmosphere. They knit together a sympathy upholding daily life.
    Inside, outside, back, front, around, through. I am hysterical!!! There is more, but we can talk and walk across it now and later, again.
    The title of this series, "Thought-forms" comes from the 1901 theosophical text by Annie Besant and C.W. Leadbeater, outlining a mystical visual vocabulary of concrete emotions.

Shawn Kuruneru: The Object is Freedom @ Blackston


Shawn Kuruneru: The Object is Freedom
Blackston Gallery
29C Ludlow Street
New YorkNY


Opening Reception:  Sunday, October 28th, 6 - 8 P.M. 
28 October - 16 December, 2012

OPENING RECEPTION RESCHEDULED FOR FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 9TH FROM 6 TO 8 PM DUE TO SANDY

For this exhibition Shawn Kuruneru creates a site-specific, temporary, large-scale abstract drawing with ink beads distributed over the gallery floor. The ink beads are various small mixed media (couscous, pebbles, clay) painted with India ink. Each bead represents one dot mark and the hardwood floor provides the surface, color and sheen for the drawing. Reverting back to an extremely basic form of drawing Kuruneru creates poetic abstract pictures with the simplest of means (ink pen, ink paint) to explore the inherent functions of mark making. 

In his employment of the mark over varied surfaces - canvas, wood, walls, floors, foam -- and choice of materials Kuruneru's Minimalist practice embraces intuition, impermanence, uncertainty and chance.   He explores mark making in a broad context through his choice of surface or medium.  Concerned with the idea of origins -- in art and self-identity -- his work celebrates the essence of gesture in creating work: the potential of reductive forms of accumulated or reworked marks in space and time to allow for quiet, often intimate, interpretation and connection by the viewer.   

A catalog has been produced in conjunction with the exhibition, with an essay by Clara Halpern.

Shawn Kuruneru (b. 1984) is from Toronto, Canada and currently lives and works in New York City.  He has exhibited at Ribordy Contemporary, Geneva, Switzerland; The Drawing Center, New York, NY; Battat Contemporary, Montreal, Quebec;  Art Metropole, Toronto; and Night Gallery, Los Angeles, California.  His work has been featured in numerous publications, including Art Forum, Interview Magazine, Domus Magazine and Columbia: Journal of Literature and Art.