March 9 - May 1, 2004
Opening Reception: Saturday, March 13th, 7-9pm
Exhibition opens to the public Tuesday, March 9th, 11am
Artists Talk: Saturday, March 27th, 3-5pm
(with Gareth James, Blake Rayne, Carlos Motta, Dee Williams and curator Christian Rattemeyer)

MAIN SPACE: Establishing Shot
Blake Rayne / Carlos Motta / Dee Williams / Gareth James / Liam Gillick, Douglas Gordon, Carsten Höller, Pierre Huyghe, Philippe Parreno, and Rirkrit Tiravanija

In film terminology, an establishing shot defines the opening sequence of a scene. Setting the mood, tone, place, and time for the events to unfold, the establishing shot is inextricably linked to the narrative that follows. Driven by the desire to be as precise as possible, it is often marked by a failure to complete its task. Ultimately, it derives its potential from the friction between its formal qualities – a single, presumably directly intelligible shot – and its function within the narrative sequence.

This exhibition serves as an "establishing shot" for the following season, comprising a mixture of emerging and more established artists to highlight shared trajectories and concerns. It aims to reinvigorate debate about the different possibilities in defining emerging contemporary artists within the parameters of recent historic practice. It also addresses the potential friction between external narrative function and internal formal resolution, focusing on works that contain a split between their thematic concerns and material manifestations. Engaging themes as diverse as the political realities of kidnapping in Latin America, the history of painting, and systems of order, rationality, and enlightenment as signified by the natural sciences, all of the works in Establishing Shot are at once hypothetical and deeply concerned.

Blake Rayne presents two new paintings that continue his ongoing dialogue with the history of modernism in painting—from Manet to Gerhard Richter—and aim to test the values and operative potential inherent to painting. Carlos Motta presents a large-scale photo installation incorporating digitally manipulated images of over 500 missing people downloaded from the internet. By using digital manipulation strategies to abstract the appearance of the images, Motta at once points to the materiality these images now possess—as found exclusively on the internet—and introduces as test of visual dis- and reappearance. Dee Williams is included with two photo/text series that investigate larger structures of order and rationality, historical truth, and the construction of history by focusing on small details—streets in Berlin named after natural scientists and the republication of an 1840s daguerrotype. Gareth James presents a sculpture that is informed by his recent collaborations under the art world persona Storm von Helsing. Representing a first attempt of offering a portrait of von Helsing, James work brings up questions of collaboration and the operations at work in producing both the role and practice of the artist. The collaborative films Vicinato and Vicinato 2 by Liam Gillick, Douglas Gordon, Carsten Höller, Pierre Huyghe, Philippe Parreno, and Rirkrit Tiravanija engage concerns of authorship, creativity, and experimentation in an elegant and philosophical manner.

A small catalogue will be published to accompany the exhibition.

Blake Rayne, "No More Winter, We are Tired of Your Free Coffee", 2003, oil on canvas (detail), 66 x 72 inches, courtesy Greene Naftali Gallery, New York

ARCHITECTURE AND DESIGN PROJECT SERIES
L.E.FT Squatville — Franchising the Domestic

L.E.FT, Squatville – Francising the Domestic (detail)	L.E.FT, Extended Living

Within American suburbia, city planning and zoning practices have left traditional living spaces isolated and surrounded by corporate zones for shopping, working, and recreation. Taking this as a starting point, L.E.FT investigates the zones of contact between the domestic and the corporate. Squatville uses a subtractive approach to encroach upon the various corporate models that simulate different functions of domesticity. The domestic becomes franchised into the corporate; next to a hotel, Home subtracts its bedrooms, next to a restaurant, its kitchen. Its degree-zero is its self-demise, a total parasite living on its surroundings. L.E.FT is a NYC-based design collective comprised of architects Makram el-Kadi, Ziad Jamaleddine, and Naji Moujaes.

Squatville is made possible, in part, through a generous contribution from the New York Metropolitan Chapter of the AUB Alumni Association of North America.

PROJECT SPACE:
Kaye Donachie Never Learn Not To Love
Curated by Lisa Ivorian-Gray, part of the Emerging Curators Series

< Kaye Donachie, Give up your world, come an' be with me (I'm your kind, I'm your kind), Oil on canvas, 50 x 65 cm, Courtesy Maureen Paley Interim Art, London

Donachie’s paintings depict counterculture revolutionaries and other nonconformists: young people in gangs, cults and communes. As if drawn from the artist’s memory, or personal recollections, the figures are blurry, their bodies articulated by loose brushstrokes. Faces project vacant stares, seemingly possessed by a higher occult power, while others are obscured by wind blown locks. Teenagers are poised languidly in a state of waiting, evoking a sense of loss and a yearning for beauty and tranquility. Moody colors, often suffused with a garish yellow light, create a dramatically eerie and otherworldly atmosphere. The sentimental titles of the paintings, borrowed from various pop song lyrics, add another layer of nostalgia and intrigue to the scenes portrayed.

Never Learn Not To Love is Kaye Donachie's first exhibition in the United States. A graduate of the Royal College of Art, London, Donachie’s small–scale oil paintings form part of a current resurgence of figurative painting in contemporary art. Curated by Lisa Ivorian Gray, as part of the Emerging Curators Series.

Kaye Donachie was included in the first Prague Biennale, Peripheries Become the Centre, Veletrzni Palac, Prague, 2003, and has exhibited in Yes! I am A Long Way From Home, Wolverhampton Art Gallery; The Nunnery, London; Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art, Sunderland; K.I.A.D., Canterbury, and Dirty Pictures, The Approach, London.