June 21 – July 29, 2005
Opening Reception: Tuesday, June 21, 6–8pm
(Please note: Artists Space will be closed on Saturdays during the month of July)

Wallace Whitney, Cut Off Shorts, 2003 oil on canvas, 82 x 70 inches. Courtesy CANADA, New York.

MAIN SPACE: Hunch & Flail
Phyllis Baldino, Jackie Gendel, Karl Haendel, Hilary Harnischfeger, Olav Christopher Jenssen, Pam Lins, Lisi Raskin, Greg Smith, Michael Smith, A.L. Steiner, Garth Weiser, Wallace Whitney.

Curated by Amy Sillman as part of the Artists Select Series.

Hunch: an intuition, an internal sense of knowing something. Flail: to thrash about awkwardly on the verge of imbalance.

Hunch & Flail is about proceeding from a gut feeling. It is a show about artists who work with the teetering uncertainty between knowing and not knowing, the intuitive and somatic process of constructing resolutely handmade objects and systems. This show brings together the work of twelve artists using diverse media who share a common embrace of process as a determining factor in arriving at form. All of them proceed through psychological spaces of sublimatio and instinct, private realms of the anxious, the intuitive, the fallible and the absurd, armed with an optimistic trust in material intelligence and an openness to the risk of embarrassment or failure.

Pam Lins, Day for Night, 2005 mixed media, 5 x 5 x 5 feet. Courtesy of the artist.	Greg Smith, Shrug and The Cakeman, 2004, video still, courtesy of the artist.

Karl Haendel, Faith/Failure (after Florian Maier-Aichen and Mungo Thomson), ghost version, mirrored, 2004, unique C-Print, 51 x 41 inches. Courtesy the artist and Anna Helwing Gallery, Los Angeles.	Michael Smith, A Brownish Hue, 2004 ink and watercolor, 14 x 17 inches. Courtesy of Lars Tellman.

Andrew Kuo, Angry Room, 2005 acrylic silk-screen on paper, 15.5 x 16.5 inches. Courtesy of the artist.	Andrew Kuo, I've Always Liked You But Whatever, 2005 acrylic silk-screen cut paper, 15 x 21 inches. Courtesy of the artist.

Andrew Kuo' s works on paper layer cut-out forms and silkscreened imagery to describe new, abstract locations. Specific architectural details taken from such sources as Venetian palaces and iron fences are combined with patterns derived from interior details as well as natural forms and remote landscapes. The found imagery is brought from the digital realm into the manual, as Kuo individually hand-cuts and prints his pieces. Kuo will present a large-scale, unique book that spans over thirty feet, as well as new works created specifically for this exhibition, his first solo show in New York. Curated by Letha Wilson, Associate Curator, Artists Space.

Heidrun Holzfeind , Exposed, 2005 film still, Beta transferred to DVD, 40 minutes. Produced in collaboration with Katherine Devoir	Heidrun Holzfeind , Exposed, 2005 film still, Beta transferred to DVD, 40 minutes. Produced in collaboration with Katherine Devoir

Artist Heidrun Holzfeind often shows the circumstances of individuals considered to be social outsiders, like the Romanian immigrants now living in her grandparents’ house in Austria or the homeless man who quit his job to publish a book. In her most recent film, Exposed, Holzfeind chronicles the life of Katherine Devoir, a 35-year old dancer who suffers from MCS, a chronic environmental illness caused by synthetic chemicals. At times painfully close, the film charts the restricted range of Katherine’s acceptable spaces and social contact and attempts to raise empathy for her suffering.

In-kind support generously provided by Exertools, Inc. www.exertools.com