UNRELATED
Curated by MATTHEW HIGGS
4 July – 10 August 2008
DAN ASHER
PAUL BLOODGOOD
SAM GORDON
JANICE GUY
JUDY LINN
Unrelated brings together the work of five artists currently based in New York. Outside of this shared
locale the artists and their respective works have little in common. Group shows typically seek to homogenize art, to establish points of correspondence between individual artists and discrete art works based on shared formal concerns or common intentions, etc. ‘Unrelated’ seeks to resist this process, creating instead a space for highly idiosyncratic artists and artworks to simply coexist, albeit temporarily, in Wilkinson’s upper gallery spaces. ‘Unrelated’ has been organized by Matthew Higgs, the director of New York’s White Columns. Higgs’ own work will be on view concurrently in Wilkinson’s lower gallery.
Dan Asher is a mercurial artist who for more than thirty years has worked across photography, film, painting, drawing, sculpture and music. He was a significant presence in New York’s downtown art scene of the late 1970s and early 1980s, and in Cologne’s art scene in the early 1990s (during which time his work was shown in London at Joshua Compston’s Factual Nonsense.) In the mid-to-late 1970s he worked extensively as a photographer documenting the social realities of New York’s Bowery and its nascent punk scene. In 2005 Asher’s work was the subject of an informal career survey at Gavin Brown’s enterprise in New York. At Wilkinson he is represented by a group of rare oil stick drawings from c. 1983. Asher will have a solo show at White Columns, New York, this coming September.
Paul Bloodgood was a co-founder – in the late 1980s - of New York’s influential AC Project Room, an artist-run commercial gallery, that introduced the work many significant artists and hosted Isa Genzken’s now infamous ‘Fuck The Bauhaus’ show. In the 1990s his work was shown in New York at both Gavin Brown’s enterprise and 303 Gallery, during which time he also made an artist’s book of his text collages for Matthew Higgs’ ‘Imprint 93’ publishing project. After a sabbatical from making art Bloodgood has recently started to show again, his work was included in Clarissa Dalrymple’s 2007 show ‘Looking Back’ at White Columns, and is currently on view in a three-person show at David Zwirner, New York. At Wilkinson he will show a group of recent paintings – that collide his interest in
20th Century abstraction and 17th Century Chinese landscape painting – alongside a group of works on paper produced over the past decade.
Sam Gordon’s “The Lost Kinetic World, Volumes 1 – 12” (2005-2007) is a 24 hour video work that Gordon has described as: “… a magazine disguised as a movie, featuring art moments from the recent past.” Shot mostly in New York’s art world (with brief interludes filmed in Los Angeles, Miami, and San Francisco) “The Lost Kinetic World” functions as a moving diary (of sorts), a time capsule that documents Gordon’s ongoing exposure to art works, exhibitions, performances, lectures, and other art-related events. Described as a “free-form poem” Gordon has suggested that any segment from the film’s 24 hour duration can be viewed as being “representative of the whole.” Epic in its scope, yet compellingly ordinary, Gordon’s film serves as a precise, yet highly subjective restaging of an individual’s experience of art. Sam Gordon’s solo exhibitions include Feature Inc., New York (1997, 1999, 2000, 2003, 2006, 2007), Ratio 3, San Francisco (2005), and Marc Foxx, Los Angeles (2001). This is the first showing of “The Lost Kinetic World, Volumes 1 - 12” outside of the U.S.
Janice Guy trained as an artist in the late 1970s in the legendary photography class of Bernd and Hilla Becher in Düsseldorf (where she studied alongside fellow class mate Thomas Struth.) Prior to their reemergence in 2007 (at White Columns) Guy’s photographs had not been seen since 1979, when she had her only solo exhibition at Galerie Ricke in Cologne. Guy’s work depicts the artist self-consciously engaged in the act of photographing herself. Exploring questions of narcissism, (self) objectification, and the processes of representation Guy’s works can be understood as part of a complex and ongoing interrogation of identity-related image-making that includes work by Dan Graham, Hannah Wilke, and Urs Luthi, among many others. Guy abandoned art making in the early 1980s and is now better known as the co-director of the New York gallery Murray Guy. At Wilkinson Guy will show a group of large format, hand-tinted vintage prints from c. 1978/79. (Photographic work from this era by Guy is currently on view at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.)
Judy Linn is widely known for her early images of Robert Mapplethorpe and Patti Smith (Linn’s iconic photographs grace the cover of Smith’s 1972 book ‘Seventh Heaven’ and her 1976 album ‘Radio Ethiopia’), Linn’s photographs, which deftly avoid categorization, have, for more than three decades, described a world that exists just beyond our rational everyday. Linn’s approach and sensibility, which often seems closer to that of a painter or poet, is startlingly idiosyncratic: her images are possessed by an extraordinary economy, wit and intelligence. Focusing on seemingly mundane aspects of the social landscape Linn’s photographs privilege and celebrate the incidental, the peripheral, the marginal, the overlooked, and the neglected. Recent solo shows include White Columns (2005), Presentation House, Vancouver (2007), and Feature Inc., New York (2007, 2001, 1997, 1995.) At Wilkinson Linn will present a discrete group of images produced over the past thirty years.
