8 Sept 2007 to 8 Oct 2007
Opening Reception: SATURDAY September 8th, 6-8 pm
BELLWETHER
134 Tenth Avenue
(between 18th and 19th Streets)
NY 10011
New York, NY
New York
North America
p: +1 212-929-5959
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w: www.bellwethergallery.com
DANA FRANKFORT makes gestural paintings based upon the shape and connoted meaning of a specific word or phrase. These works, at times, appear to be abstract, invoking the pictorial language of such Color Field painters as Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland. However, the very literalness of the depicted language in Frankfort’s paintings ground her work in a figural realism that is similar in spirit to Jasper Johns’ flags or targets. Although Frankfort employs language primarily for formal reasons, it is impossible to ignore the implicit meanings in the words she selects. This creates a compelling interaction between form and content as the words give the work an internal structure in which she can play with such tensions as foreground and background and pictorial edges and compositional scale.
Recently, Frankfort has expanded her imagery to include representations of the Star of David. As with her pictures of words the image in these new works is subtle. The strokes that make up the star, at times, dissolve into the background. Nevertheless, she gives the viewer enough information to recognize the symbol, which in her handling is both ambiguous and highly specific. The Star of David paintings along with the other pieces in “DF” raise fundamental questions at the core of painting: when is a work finished, what is the relationship between pictorial edges and the picture plane, and whether or not a painting is an object.
Dana Frankfort was born in Houston, Texas. She received her MFA from Yale University and was a Core Fellow at the Glassell School of Art in Houston, Texas. She most recently had a solo show at Kantor/Feuer Gallery in Los Angeles. She will participate in the upcoming exhibition “Abstract America” at the Saatchi Gallery in London.
In the Project Room we will be exhibiting videos by ABBEY WILLIAMS.
In Bellwether’s Project Room ABBEY WILLIAMS will be exhibiting two new videos, Mum (2007) and La Mulatto (2007), which take on questions of responsibility, identity, history, and representation. In the two-channel piece Mum, Williams borrows the subtext of surrender and desire from 1950’s mummy movies. With frenetic editing and staccato sound she weaves these altered and reconstructed images (along with her own footage) to create an abstract narrative of sexual anxiety. La Mulatto conflates an image of a 19th century terra-cotta bust with the artist’s self-portrait, employing a post-black sense of multi-racial identity while examining the ever present question of cultural identification, beauty, amidst an image which literally intertwines past with present. Both works address comparison as a form of critique; differing historical representations of women are juxtaposed with images of the artist to demonstrate the implied imperatives of corporeal life: there can be no transcendence of sex, no rationalist utopia oblivious to the body.
