10 July 2008 to 10 Aug 2008
Hours : Thurs–Mon, 12-6pm
Opening: Thursday, July 10–Sunday, August 10, 2008
Jack the Pelican Presents
487 Driggs Ave
Williamsburg, Brooklyn
New York, NY
New York
North America
p: +1 646-644-6756
m:
f:
w: www.jackthepelicanpresents.com
The first collaboration between New Yorker Tyler Coburn and Londoner Sebastian Craig, "Ghostwriters" is an imaginary account of Brooklyn narrated in drawing, architecture and prose.
Building upon the work of Robert Smithson and W.G. Sebald, among others, Coburn and Craig will transform Jack the Pelican Presents into a sparse visitor center, populated with an evolving array of objects and interventions, including Craig's projected 3D models of the gallery space; oversize, folded halftone prints of local buildings; and a binder filled with text documentation of improvisatory performances that Coburn staged, at Craig's request, throughout the neighborhood.
The collaboration is long overdue: Coburn first met Craig in London in 2006 at i-cabin, a project space and publisher Craig oversees. In i-cabin's peripatetic activity and in Craig's work, which has been exhibited at the Serpentine Gallery, London, and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York, Coburn observed refreshing, innovative approaches to institutional critique. So after completing his first New York solo show, this past spring at MARCH Gallery, and rounding out screenings and exhibitions at CRG Gallery and Gavin Brown's passerby, respectively, Coburn invited Craig to collaborate.
Much as Washington Irving invented an extended history for the young Dutch colony, in his novel Knickerbocker's History of New York (1809), so Coburn and Craig consider the need for new myths, woven apace with the city's cycles of destruction and development.
Through an ongoing, transatlantic exchange, in which Coburn meticulously describes the art exhibitions and environs particular to Jack the Pelican's borough, Craig envisages a place he has never been—and that, for him, is synonymous 80's hip hop films, images of graffiti and The Cosby Show. Craig's ensuing drawings, ideas and instructions are translated by Coburn into the exhibition as objects, texts and propositions, caught halfway between imaginative minimalism and descriptive excess. Theirs is an architecture conceived to occupy a point in the constellation of projects drawn atop the map of the borough, but one which inclines towards the notional: offering hypotheses, not answers.
In Italo Calvino's novel Imaginary Cities (1978), Marco Polo describes to Kublai Khan the many metropolises of his empire with such fanciful language as to suggest that each place may, in fact, be one of infinite outcomes of any given city. Coburn and Craig treat this condition of compossibility as integral to metropolis and exhibition alike and imbue the conventionally static form of the gallery show with ongoing products of their correspondence. "Ghostwriters" thus tells the story of its life, and like a text (and like a city), its account is subject to revision and amendment, obfuscation and revelation.
Like any text and any city, the exhibition has a grain, along or against which it may be read. To read along it is to observe much of what has been described in the paragraphs above. To read against is to discover a hidden side of this story: an array of off-site drawings made, often illegally, throughout the neighborhood. Curious visitors may inquire as to their whereabouts, though seeing them will require those willing to transgress the limits of the public city.
We invite you to read along and against.
AFFIRMATION DUNGEON Dan Arps
Jack the Pelican is thrilled to offer New York its first glimpse of New Zealand sensation Dan Arps.
At first, it was going to be merely a selection of his works on paper (easy to ship)—and don't get me wrong, these scrawly-feely paintings and photo-collages are really fresh... (they're well described by the Michael Lett gallery as "sad hallucinations")—but the artist insists on giving you a "real Dan Arps show!"
Arps is really on a roll now, with powerhouse shows running concurrently at Neon Parc in Melbourne and Michael Lett in Auckland, New Zealand; and there's just been published an important catalog of his recent "Gestapo Pussy Ranch" project at The Physics Room in Christchurch.
Look forward here to nothing less than ambitious pop-perfect trashtastica. "Junk is just too banal for words" headlines his recent review in The New Zealand Herald. The Ozzie press seems a bit more thoughtful:
Apathetic, cynical and often humorous, Arps' intuitive manipulation of his found materials speaks of the excesses of our commodity-saturated existence from a point as far removed as he can get from the slick over-production that characterises it. It is a kind of contemporary mash-up of surrealist, pop art and performative elements using whatever is at hand to convey his defiant message; he is consciously careless, iconoclastic and coarse. If Salvador Dali and Oscar the Grouch were teenage flatmates today, these are the kind of posters that might adorn their bedroom walls.
--Brooke Babington, excerpt of review, CitySearch, Melbourne, June 5, 2008
Too, be sure to check out (and print out, according to the helpful instructions) Arps's magazine Natural Selection (he's co-editor)—it's all about cheeky practical dissemination of ideas about a truly vital art scene that for most of us seems so impossibly far away. Arps's been active in it for a few years now, getting dirty in artist-run spaces like Black Cube in Christchurch and Gambia Castle (founding member) in Auckland. Really, these are things you might enjoy knowing about.
