February 27 - April 10, 2010 Opening Reception: Saturday, February 27th, 6-8PM
D'Amelio Terras is pleased to present our second solo exhibition with Los Angeles-based artist Jedediah Caesar. The exhibition will present new multi-panel wall sculptures as well as large-scale works. The artist is calling the larger mound-shaped works "horizon sculptures" and will produce them in Long Island City's Socrates Sculpture Park just prior to the opening.
Caesar's medium is his own material - a unique amalgamation of resin, earth and detritus. Much of the internal structure of the sculptures, petrified matter, retained legibility while other bits smolder and disintegrate into micro-storms of frozen perforations. The panel sculptures are layered with raw debris and sloping patterns of muted, secondary-colored resins. Caesar's sculptures are abstract landscapes and relate as much to painting as to experimental film. Like animated shifts between film cells, the pattern of these panels seems to repeat, but deviates with subtlety.
For the new horizon sculptures, Caesar will excavate shallow pits, coring and exploring Socrates' Sculpture Park, formerly an abandoned riverside landfill and illegal dumpsite. The artist will use the park's reconstituted earth as a specific site to dig holes. Caesar's plaster-cast sculptures will document the shape of his dig and will be inverted into particle-encrusted relief sculpture for the gallery exhibition.
Jedediah Caesar received his MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles. His work has been shown in solo exhibitions at the Blanton Museum, University of Texas at Austin, Texas and at Susanne Vielmetter, Los Angeles. Recent group exhibitions include the Whitney Biennial 2008, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; "Abstract America: New Painting and Sculpture", Saatchi Gallery, London, UK; the "California Biennial 2008", Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, CA; "Trace", Whitney Museum of American Art at Altria, New York. In 2009, Caesar participated in "Stardust" at the Fundament Foundation, Tilburg, the Netherlands. In May of 2010, Caesar will mount a solo exhibition at Bloomberg SPACE gallery in London.
Front Room: Charles Burchfield February 27 - April 10, 2010
D'Amelio Terras is pleased to present an exhibition of 17 early graphite drawings by revered American master Charles Burchfield (1893-1967). Burchfield is currently the subject of a major exhibition curated by artist Robert Gober at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. The exhibition, Heat Waves in A Swamp: The Paintings of Charles Burchfield, travels to the to The Whitney Museum of American Art in New York from June 24 through September of 2010.
Historically, Burchfield has long been associated with large-scale, fantastical watercolor depictions of the American landscape. This exhibition will focus on the artist's graphite drawings from 1915 through 1950. More intimate in scale, Burchfield's drawings suggest a complex state of mind as mundane forms take on sinister characteristics: dark shadows dominate the roofline, windows, and doorways of houses; phantasmagorical shapes and gnarled tree branches embody human like forms thus conveying a deep level of emotional fervor.
By presenting these early drawings in a more contemporary context, we hope to shed new light on the artist's work. An obsessive collector, organizer, and archivist, Burchfield approached drawing as a means of constantly exploring and searching for form and meaning. Sketches and doodles often catalogue the natural world around him, emerging as the link between the outer world of nature and the inner world of the artist's emotional life. In a journal entry dated July 11, 1952, Burchfield writes, "The subconscious mind seemed to be in complete control--and I did unpremeditated things which later turned out to be exactly right."
Although Burchfield is less known to many contemporary audiences, the artist was the Museum of Modern Art's first one-person exhibition in 1930. Burchfield's 1956 retrospective exhibition was organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art and subsequently traveled to six cities. D'Amelio Terras is pleased to acknowledge DC Moore Gallery with their help in facilitating this exhibition.
For more information about the show: www.damelioterras.com For press and visuals requests please contact Bridget Donahue at 212.352.9460 or at bridget@damelioterras.com.
D'Amelio Terras shows Adam Adach, Polly Apfelbaum, Massimo Bartolini, Delia Brown, Jedediah Caesar, Nicole Cherubini, Tony Feher, Roland Flexner, Joanne Greenbaum, Leslie Hewitt, Matt Keegan, John Morris, Robert Moskowitz, Rei Naito, Noguchi Rika, Demetrius Oliver, Cornelia Parker, Dario Robleto, Heather Rowe, Sam Samore, Karin Sander, Noah Sheldon, Yoshihiro Suda, and Sara VanDerBeek.
