Category: Projects

Marianne Vitale
Presser

8 May – 26 June 2010

Deborah Colton Gallery
2445 North Boulevard
Houston Texas 77098

Deborah Colton Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of new work by the quixotic New York artist Marianne Vitale. With large, vibrant paintings, dense and thick with pigment, and relief sculptures suggesting enlarged body parts, Vitale hypertrophies the intricate intimacy of her pen and ink drawings into a churning no-fly zone over the contemporary. Accompanying the canvases I Got Rid of the Horse and Now There’s Just You, and Fifth Phase Handsome and two wall sculptures from her Healthcare Series – Navel and Elbow, (all 2010) Vitale has constructed one of her hybrid sculptures, in-situ, out of found material, debris, and a junked mini motor-bike – Presser (2010). Also on view are two series of drawings: Flushed Up and Ploughing (2009), five colorful and riddling pen and ink compositions, and Copper Line (2010), nine fast and forcible sequential graphite drawings on copper-coated paper (2010).

Vitale’s video Patron is currently on view at The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York for the Whitney Biennial 2010, in which she delivers a nine-minute abusive rant “like a psychotic drill sergeant” parodying authoritarian posturing.

Marianne Vitale is a New York artist working in various mediums. Her sculptural practice often evokes an idea of the natural world remade from what has been discarded and abandoned. Vitale freezes forms into make-shift structures, fantastic creatures, hybrid animals and contorted beasts that can appear both fragile and menacing. Sometimes sympathetic, often uneasy, Vitale’s sculptures pull the tension between figure and abstraction, mid-process of either melting or forming, with skin dripping from their frames. These extracts stretch, move, coil, hide, and invite to mark an encounter of sinister illusoriness. When using performance and video, Vitale draws on the instinctive yet carefully sculpted absurdity apparent in her drawings and sculptures, with an added personal physicality that creates a visceral, even combative relationship between artist and audience. Vitale’s work has been exhibited internationally, including the 2010 Whitney Biennial, SculptureCenter, White Columns, Kunstverein NY, Brooklyn Museum, all in New York; Kling & Bang, Reykjavik, Iceland; Tensta Konsthall, Stockholm, Sweden; Deborah Colton Gallery, Houston, Texas; IBID Projects, London, UK; and the Cass Sculpture Foundation, Sussex, England.

November 6-22, 2009

Emily Harvey Foundation, 537 Broadway, New York

Roulette is co-produced by OUTPOST NYC DCG, Emily Harvey Foundation and Performa 09

The project is part of Performa 09

Michel Auder, Felicia Ballos, Salvador DalÌ, Molly Gochman, Amy Granat, George Maciunas, Maripol, Jonas Mekas, Lola Schnabel, Mai Ueda, Ultra Violet, Cecilia Widenheim

Curated by Liutauras Psibilskis

Roulette featured a performance by Jonas Mekas and the band Now We Are Here, with special guests. Mai Ueda hosted a dinner performance that included contributions from fashion designers, musicians and artists. A new video installation by Michel Auder was presented. Amy Granat, in collaboration with dancers Felicia Ballos and Cecilia Widenheim, showed an installation that incorporated performative film, movement and light. Documentation of performances by Salvador DalÌ, were screened, as well as rediscovered videos by Ultra Violet and Maripol. The show also included prints of the work by George Maciunas and the young artists Molly Gochman and Lola Schnabel.

By integrating the past and present, the viewer was presented with a variety of concepts and beliefs, past and now, all related to the idea of a performance and game. Roulette reflected on the risk-taking and possibilities of contemporary reality, marked by its gambles and potential rewards. The project changed with each successive event; as one event closed, another opened.

Events:

Friday, 6 November, 9-10pm

Jonas Mekas with friends and the band Now We Are Here, featuring Jonas Mekas as the lead singer.

Tuesday, 10 November, 7-9pm

Presentation of performance documentation and performative film. Rarely seen work, addressing themes of game, transmutation and the changing of social and gender roles, by George Maciunas, Ultra Violet, and Maripol, as well as documentation of Salvador DalÌís performances in New York filmed by Jonas Mekas.

Saturday, 14 November, 7-9pm

A Family Dinner in Parallel Universe by Mai Ueda and her friends. Ueda invited a selection of her friends: musicians, fashion designers, and artists to perform, dine together.

Sunday, 15 November, 7-10pm

Innocence in Extremis by Amy Granat in collaboration with dancers Felicia Ballos and Cecilia Widenheim. Collaboration between extreme cinema and dance: a variety of moving images and a simultaneous dance performance playing with light, darkness, shadows and sound.

Wednesday, 18 November, 7-9pm

The Good Life, new video installation by Michel Auder involved the poets Kathy Acker, Julien Blainem, William Burroughs, John Cooper Clarke, Ira Cohen, Gregory Corso, Brian Gyson, Harry Hoogstraten, Jean Jacques Lebel, Gerard Malanga, Michael McClure, Giulia Niccolai, Ron Padgett, Adriano Spatola and others performing for an audience and for Auder’s camera in 1979.

**CHEMICAL CITY**

September 8th through November 3, 2007

Deborah Colton Gallery, Houston, Texas

Michel Auder, Hubert Kretzschmar, Maripol, Jonas Mekas, Michael Portnoy, Agathe Snow, Marianne Vitale

Curated by Liutauras Psibilskis

Maripol, “Debbie Harry,” 1985, Sx 70 Polaroid on Canvas, 25 x 25 Inches

Deborah Colton Gallery is pleased to present Chemical City. The exhibition features several mediums that explore the creative climate of downtown Manhattan’s urban cultures over the last 30 years. Each of the artists have produced specific pieces for the project. The opening will be marked by a performance by Michael Portnoy from 6:30 to 8:30pm.

The title refers to the fusion, permutation, and exchange of elements, concepts and thoughts that are inherent to New York. It is an aspect of the city that can be thought of as its chemistry. Chemical City gives us a glimpse of creativity and brings together generations of artists who have found their experiences and inspiration in New York’s streets, music scene, and street cultures. Chemical City, like downtown Manhattan itself, is an experience revolving around combined elements brought together by the interaction of diverse forms of art. The featured artists open doors to reality and fantasy worlds that reflect the experience of living in downtown from the 70s to the present. The collection brings together highly respected artists who are regarded as the cornerstones for the downtown art scene and also younger artists who have become important contributors of the scene today.

Michel Auder shows a film based on footage he filmed in 1977 of a walk with legendary artist, poet and actor Taylor Mead on Christopher Street in New York. New photographic pieces by Auder will be also shown in the exhibition. For the first time Jonas Mekas will show a video film based on a footage filmed in 1990 as he walked through Soho and Lover East Side, giving us an informal tour of the city along with his Frozen Film Frames. Marianne Vitale’s work consists of crude oil drawings and paintings on silk, and an architectural structure built with found materials, reflecting elements of the metropolitan living experience, inspired by energy of life on the Lower East Side. Maripol will feature new selection Polaroids of legendary art and pop personalities in the 80s. Hubert Kreschmar has been closely involved both with music and art scenes of the city, his collages from 1988 will be shown in the exhibition. Previously unreleased footage by Agathe Snow documents the 2005 dance marathon art event she organized at Ground Zero, featuring an unprecedented gathering of more then 200 downtown Manhattan residents for a 24-hour dance-a-thon. Interested in games and human behavioral patterns, Michael Portnoy offers a new edition of his game table that debuted at the 2007 Moscow Biennale. This work reflects Fluxus strategies and, and to a larger extent, the ideas of play in the city and society as a whole.

Liutauras Psibilskis is a New York based independent exhibition curator and writer who holds a MA in Visual Culture from Goldsmiths College, University of London. He writes for Artforum International and has curated numerous exhibitions in museums around the world including Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Monash Museum of Modern Art and Australian Center for Contemporary Art. Melbourne, Helmhaus. Zurich, BAK. Utrecht, the Netherlands. For the 2005 Venice Biennale he curated the celebrated Jonas Mekas retrospective in the Lithuanian Pavilion that was awarded a Special Mention for extraordinary presentation of a contemporary classic artist. His upcoming projects include a film and video screening program for Tate Modern, London and an international performance and moving image project at Miami Beach Cinematheque for the upcoming Art Basel Miami Beach.