| Outpost presents the Spring installment of our SeeThru program, Memory Room, a group exhibition curated by artist Andrew Ross, in which the gallery becomes territory populated by both obstructions and seductions. As you progress through the space, objects are obscured, revealed and then obscured again by the structure of the exhibit. Navigation yields unfamiliar relationships among commonplace objects. Redolent with memories, the familiar components of each work are altered by misuse creating strange, humorous, or in your face scenarios and the whole becomes more than the sum of its parts.
Memory Room is on view at Outpost Gallery, 1665 Norman Street in Ridgewood (Halsey stop on the L train) from June 10-24, Wednesday through Sunday, 1-6pm, or by appointment. Opening reception Friday, June 10, 6-9pm.
Ala Dehghan’s practice is a complex process of collage, assemblage, and montage. She collects and archives a constellation of images and information. Each work grows during the process of subtraction, removal, lamination, separation and displacement, and combined of the built and the found, the organic matters and the synthetic mass-produced materials, the transparent and the opaque. They are layered, filtered and stacked to create a new lens to perceive the psychological, political and social undercurrents. She plays with the idea of perception in relation to the body, how new subjectivities arise as you orient and re-orient your body in relation to the work.
Brandon Ndife uses ruin or urban artifact, a record of absence just marred by the slightest inflection of man-made marks and recognizable commercial forms.
Don Edler makes site-specific works of commercial construction materials, cast materials, and organic matter, inspired by metaphysics and cosmology.
Devin Kenny is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, musician, and independent curator from the South Side of Chicago.
Victoria Campbell attends to the desires encoded within things. Her interdisciplinary practice is deeply invested in the poetics and politics of language.
Micaela Carolan is part performance engineer, part cultural capitalist. Her work presents the logic of experience-driven economies by intervening with essential images in social spaces. Here she conducts experiments to achieve contradictory alignments of self.
Katie Loselle makes paintings that attempt to accurately emit psychic states, with specificity unlinked to semiotic images. The forms in her paintings, layered and shadow-like, shift in their presence and legibility as they are viewed.
Kyla Chevrier is known for site-specific installations that interrupt the architecture of the gallery and the synesthetic relationship of color to specific people and places.
Kayode Ojo works in media ranging from painting to sculptural installations, making reference to seductive moments in our consumerist culture.
Milo Carney, employs the Swiss-Army-Knifing of anything and everything and re-appropriates these functions into a context that challenges their ingenuity and purpose.
Pamela Council was born in Southampton, New York and lives in South Bronx, New York. She makes sculptures, prints, performances, jokes, and more. Recent works are abstract sensual experiences that freestyle on notions of Americana, self care, estate management, personal style, and the preciousness of tacky-luxe products. A combination of artist-made and acquired materials is used in the work, which has been featured at the Studio Museum in Harlem, Williams College Museum of Art, Rebuild Foundation, and the Wassaic Project. Pamela has created a commission for Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. She received a B.A. from Williams College an M.F.A. from Columbia University. Pamela is currently an artist-in-residence at MANA Contemporary Art.
Slinko uses divergent methodologies from anthropological fieldwork to improvise performance, mining discarded ideas, failed dreams, and abandoned hopes, and giving graspable forms to ambiguities of human experience.
Curator Andrew Ross is a sculptor, image-maker and occasional performer, with a vested interest in the intersection of aesthetics, politics and storytelling. He believes that ideals are best expressed obliquely, through things rather than through language; attributing much of his work to an exploration of conflicted motives and intentions communicated by an inventive and idiosyncratic production process.
Ross holds a BFA from the Cooper Union and has been a resident of Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, LMCC’s Swing Space, Atelier Mondial, and Open Sessions at The Drawing Center. His work has exhibited at institutions including The Drawing Center, Artists Space Books and Talks, The James Gallery at CUNY Center for the Humanities, BHQFU, SIGNAL, and The Studio Museum in Harlem.
Curatorial Statement by Andrew Ross
Narratives can aid personal histories in superseding the historical establishment. Utilizing cultural signifiers associated with our own perceived and imagined histories, artists create blurred contexts. Attempts to obliterate the past by overlapping with present are important to the creation of new ideals based on the experiences of minds molded by diaspora and globalization. If we were to think of contexts as physical provinces the works would be on the border with one foot in each state. And perhaps for some we would have to build a time machine, or employ a quadruped, or even an octopus. We experience works like these with a similarly hybrid point of view; not just as artworks, but subversions of an infinite and unpredictable group of plausible encounters. The plausibility of course requires some familiarity with the cultural signifiers used, creating divisions between spectators and those who identify with the work, or those that have experienced similar narratives. This is not to say that some won’t understand the work, but maybe to suggest that the encounter is as large a part of interpretation as representation.
I’ve assembled a group of artists to contribute work to an experiment in exhibition design. A maze-like structure will contain the artworks in this show, reducing sight lines and enhancing the sensations associated with approaching each individual work. In the Memory Room one backtracks to get a second look at a something, as opposed to the white cube model wherein they might simply be able to turn around. The work is remembered always in relation to our own position as might be the case when stumbling upon an interesting piece of trash on the street or confronted by a fight on the subway. Or in cinema, when we know the action is in the basement or in the alleyway, and that the monster is under the bed. In the Memory Room the traces of contexts outside of the gallery are embellished with an extra dose of fictitious realism.
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