25 Apr 2008 to 25 May 2008
Hours : Thurs–Mon, 12-6pm
Opening: Friday April 25, 7–9pm
Jack the Pelican Presents
487 Driggs Ave
Williamsburg, Brooklyn
New York, NY
New York
North America
p: +1 646-644-6756
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w: www.jackthepelicanpresents.com
Your Fear Is that You Still Might Love this Country
Provocateur and pied-piper of the burgeoning Kansas City art scene, David Ford will present WHITE LIKE ME, his first New York solo exhibition at Jack the Pelican Presents from April 25–May 25, 2008.
David Ford's multimedia installation White Like Me incorporates the florid magic realism of his large-scale paintings, the incisive wit of his photography, and the unpredictability of his performance art. Against a backdrop of fantastical images of celebrity egomania/delusion — Tom Cruise gazing longingly at the night sky, for instance — and an architectural installation evoking the quaint vacuousness of mainstream American culture, Ford deploys a troop of "performers" acting as a militia. The piece's many contradictions combine to illustrate the plight of the skeptical patriot in political dismay. —Shana Nys Dambrot, Flavorpill
Occupying the entire front gallery, Ford's show of paintings, photographs, and sculptures will continue his interest in revealing the cultural juxtapositions that animate and manipulate politics, ideology and psychology in America today—themes which will in turn be activated by a local militia operating in security mode within the gallery.
WHITE LIKE ME will feature 10 of Fords works, which were manifested from his time at the Art Omi International residency. These works reflect the elaboration of concepts and soft performance developed during the course of last year. Inspired by the international community of artists at Omi, Ford began working with national symbols to examine the conflicting feelings of patriotism that remain in this cynical age. In WHITE LIKE ME, he expands up this idea, using diverse media and performance elements to confront complex cultural situations from a multiplicity of angles. Contemporary images of Mecca and wind-driven flags are forced into dialogue with the live military guard, blurring artistic mediums and destabilizing the distribution of power within the gallery.
A self-taught artist, Ford has been exploring the painterly in everyday contexts for over 20 years, incorporating diverse ideas of beauty culled from his travels in non-European societies and a discordant, political humor. Ford's deliberately rough technique and visually ornate imagery lends a folkloric air to compositions and collages of deities and corporate logos, dreamy landscapes and catch phrases that implicate the viewer in a collective search for meaning. His work has been shown nationally and internationally, with solo shows in Kansas City, MO and Mexico, and inclusion in this year's Bridge Art Fair in Miami. He has received awards from the prestigious Creative Capital Foundation, The Charlotte Street Foundation and the Tanne Foundation, studio support from Review, Inc., and inclusion in the juried New American Paintings publication.
In addition to paintings and sculptures, Ford is known for directing immersive performance installations that draw equally from traditional celebrations such as religious rituals and Mardi Gras parades, and current event scenarios of secret prisons and heightened security measures. These performances have become new rituals in their own right, connecting an artistic community and initiating collaborations with clergymen, exotic dancers, marching bands, Mayan Indians and a demolition derby. New Yorkers got a preview of Ford's "activated" installations this past September when he and twenty-four co-conspirators took over Jack the Pelican Presents to stage Maximon, a participatory spectacle honoring the Mayan god of vice—a happening that has become an underground tradition in Kansas City since 2001.
HEADSetera Peter Drake, Laurence Hegarty, Mark Mennin
Jack the Pelican presents HEADSetera, an intimate show of heady interplay between three seasoned artists—Peter Drake, Laurence Hegarty and Mark Mennin—whose work couldn't be more different.
Those who follow the goings on of the art world will no doubt recognize the names of one or another of these artists, as each is preeminently accomplished in his own arena. Unlikely, however, you will know all three. Their fans don't often mingle.
We have here a Technicolor faux-colonialist painter, a mischievous semiotician of the playroom, and a postmodern disciple of Michelangelo Buonarroti. We've not chosen them to support a theme, nothing so literal as that. What excites is their thoughtful and unexpected impress of one upon another. And how strangely they bop ! We are moved by their mutual exchange and respect , over the years, as soldiers in the trenches.
Most famous in his niche is Mark Mennin, a stone carver of rare ambition, whose landscape interventions typically embrace a geologic scale, measured in years of carving and acres of ground. Here, he unveils a confounding new body of work--belly-scaled stones in porously veined travertine and polished marble that oddly conjoin hollowed volumes of little girl frock dresses and portentously bearded patriarchal heads. One rock, two images—ambiguously simultaneous, one on top of another, or perhaps in flux.
The postmodern eye is not unaccustomed to seeing such things. Surrealist games, Dali's paranoiac-critical method, Picabia and Salle, the loading of surface with multiplicity—all very familiar. But not in stone! The material remains for us unproblematically symbolic of permanence and stability. Which is why these folk-lore dualities of man/girl seem so insistently peculiar.
Mennin did his time in the quarries of Italy. He is fluent in the history of the craft and its inherent logic, which is to say he is alert to the necessity of respecting the stubborn idiosyncrasies of the stone. (In fact, he is quite keen on the more unpredictable "irregulars" the architects typically reject.) So fluid is his process, he is able to think through it pictorially. It is mind-boggling how he fleshes the stone into color by following its mineral flows. An expert he is, but in doubling up the image Mennin manifestly subverts this sacrosanct tradition of stone-carving. It began with the Neoplatonism of Michelangelo. One soul, one stone, and a process of liberating discovery. It ends with Mennin. A juggler .
And no term might better describe Laurence Hegarty. His preoccupations are all in the air. He's critic, filmmaker, artist, of course...and quintessentially clinical psychotherapist. It's one giant loop of enlightened activity. And so with his art—the elements march into play like a troupe of impish players looking for action. It's a strange objecthood. You can just imagine one or another of these on its own, feeling as lonely as a stuffed animal, or as silent. How Hegarty plays them together is what makes them what they are. How unexpected!....or naughty? The whole is generously open-ended. And, in the reading, so up for grabs!
Hegarty dissimulates his anticipation of the game's three-dimensionality. He understates his pieces. In startling contrast to Mennin, with his dramatic stones, Hegarty casts his pieces as lightweights. Each is as iconically distinct as a board game piece, rendered with unworried modesty and divested of overmuch ego. (Think Brit, pre-YBA.) But he pre-loads them—eight months pregnant with quintuplets of association and imminence.
They look like you could—or they even want you to—pick them up and move them around with little effort, figure it all out for yourself, make it your own game. But, beg though they might, you fear that once you touch the art (or think about it), there is no end to it. If there's anything more massively tragic underneath, and indeed there probably is, it's something you have to get to. Hint hint: Buy more than one.
All the parameters of Peter Drake's paintings are, by contrast, tightly determined from the get go. We've zoomed in on little vintage toy soldiers—from his father's collection—so close our eyeballs breathe on them. But there is little we can do. The toys unresponsively perform their singular functions, as cast—charging with bayonets, firing off their Gatling gun, staring blankly ahead—always the same, battle after battle, through the decades.
Always, such figures recall the original moment of their conception in the anachronistic celebration of gallant war and imperial glory; and generations of little boys who believe/d with oversized hearts in grand codes of personal honor. At face value, these are fat, seductive pictures, charged with the romance of war. Drake plays it, echoing his soldiers' resolutely triumphant postures with exotic, deeply emotionalized twilight skies. And we play along, embracing the robust martial pride of The Man Who Would Be King . In Pyramid , 2008 it is just their heads. (Drake broke them, or imagined he did.) Still, they are unblinking stalwarts—" Rule, Britannia!" to the bitter end.
Our narcotic rapture endures for only so long, before we see Drake's masterfully warm and fuzzy sfumato haze for what it is—the image in decay, smelling sweetly of death. All one really has to do is look again, to realize it was there the whole time—signs of wear, mostly chipped paint; battle scars, material fatigue and breakdown.
