March 9 - April 23, 2005
Opening Reception: Wednesday, March 9, 6 - 8:30pm
Artists Talk: Saturday, March 12, 2:30 - 4pm
(with Carol Bove, Nathan Coley, Olaf Nicolai, Mai-Thu Perret, Bojan Sarcevic, and curator Christian Rattemeyer)

MAIN SPACE: Model Modernisms
Carol Bove • Nathan Coley • Olaf Nicolai • Mai-Thu Perret • Florian Pumhösl • de Rijke/de Rooij • Bojan Sarcevic

Model Modernisms originates from a concern for the remaining effects of different periods of utopian modernism—understood simultaneously as moments of formal and social transformation. While modernism as a set of aesthetic inventions appears historic and complete, and modernity as a period of dramatic social change seems superseded by other forces, the social and formal products of these earlier moments of utopian thought still define our everyday routines as well as our aesthetic judgments.

The artists in Model Modernisms engage subjects as diverse as the decade of civil rights and sexual revolution in America, utopian communities in the American West, the adaptations of pre-war designs in post-war socialist vernacular architecture and design, the uneasy relationship between modern aesthetics and pre-modern ornamentation, as well as the buried legacies of non-geometric abstractions in the development of a modern formal aesthetic.

Model Modernisms is supported, in part, by the Austrian Cultural Forum New York, the British Council, Etant Données, the Mondriaan Foundation, and Pro Helvetia.

Model Modernisms, Installation view.	Nathan Coley, Tower and Wall (1937 prefabs), 2005, Painted plywood, rope, tarpaulin, Dimensions variable. Image courtesy of Haunch of Venison, London.

Mai-Thu Perret, 4 Sculptures of Pure Self-Expression (The Arts and Craft Movement), 2003, black ceramic, glazed, dimensions variable.	Bojan Sarcevic, World Corner, 2000, plaster, wood.

nARCHI ECTS, Party Wall, 2005, view of the model. Image courtesy nARCHITECTS.

For Party Wall, the young New York-based office nARCHITECTS reconsiders the territorial, thermal, and optical properties of one of the most common architectural elements, the wall. Allowing gallery-goers, or neighbors, to activate the oppositional forces between a wall as means of separation and as an instigator of exchange, nARCHITECTS’ playful and dynamic intervention collapses the functions of insulation and traversal into a constantly changing object.

Design/fabrication by nARCHITECTS; Interactive design by Parul Vora and Jeff Weber. Party Wall is supported, in part, by Elise Jaffe and Jeffrey Brown, in kind support provided by Acroname Inc.

Sari Carel, Mouth Shaped Box, 2004, oil on canvas. Image courtesy of the artist.

For her paintings, Sari Carel pilfers the visual stockpiles of clichés and cornerstones, mixing and matching images as diverse as cartoon characters, art historical sources, vintage pet-lover magazines, Finnish marriage chests, and irritating patterns and backgrounds. Thriving on their capacity to confound, Carel’s works blur the boundaries between figure and ground, the canonical and the vernacular, as well as the immediately familiar and the unattainably strange.