13 Feb 2009 to 19 Apr 2009
Hours : Thurs–Mon, 12-6pm
Jack the Pelican Presents
487 Driggs Ave
Williamsburg, Brooklyn
New York, NY
New York
North America
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Going for B'roque Jennifer Delilah Claudia Hart John Wellington
February 13–March 15, 2009 Opening: Friday, February 13, 7–9pm
EQUUS MAXIMUS Gregory de la Haba February 13–March 15, 2009
WE ARE PLEASED TO ANNOUNCE WE ARE EXTENDING GREGORY DE LA HABA'S VERY POPULAR INSTALLATION "EQUUS MAXIMUS" THROUGH APRIL 19.
Over-the-top doesn't quite capture the incredible vulgarity of it all. Gregory de la Haba's Equus Maximus is unabashedly pagan. Grand carnal passions ignite in a full-scale installation of barbarism and gaudy frills. It is the decadence of Rome and the unquenchable greed of recent years. It is primitive hunger and lust, unbridled—the return of the repressed.
The main act is the massive bodies of horses as god beasts, poised in impossible throes of writhing lust—a stallion rearing high (who knew they could be so big?) and mares in cabaret red plume headdresses, sprawled down against the soft green felt of a vast craps table, piled with the gold of victory. The ladies' backs arch wildly, legs spread wide in lusty anticipation. Even Caligula might blush. These are horses as gods, lusty and primordial. So accustomed are we to representations of the horse as an animal of profound balance and grace, the powerful torsions of equine spines and limbs here is startling. De la Haba has made them thus, skinning them himself and sculpting the underlying armature of forms over the course of four years. (It should be noted that no animals were killed in the course of this production.) He was thinking about the screaming horse in Guernica and Leonardo's unfinished statue, striving to express the power of the animal.
The artist finds his creative force in the gargantuan appetite of his animus—in his blood, guts, meat and muscle. Adopting the persona of a primitive Ice-age hunter/warrior, he connects with this bestial hunger. His circus room is like a shrine, with his totems and trophies hung from the ceiling—mammoth tusks and the vacu-packed carcases of his triumphs. He reveals himself in large photos on the walls as proud viking of a beast man, standing tall, decked out in skins. But there is also an intimate and personal side to his humanity, which he revealls in paintings hanging round about the gallery. It is an imaginary family portrait and an intimate narrative, projected back to a time of innocence. We see him young and puny, fighting the grand horse. Here is the origin of his reverence for the awsomeness of the beast.
De la Haba is himself in real life a man of strong passions and obsessions. Raised in Queens and educated Harvard, he is half Puerto Rican and half Irish. He is a gambler (no stranger to the craps). He in fact made his livelihood for many years playing the ponies, and finally bought one with his winnings that was made of pure gold. Currently, his work is on display in the Queens Biennial at the Queens Museum of Art.
Special thanks to Ella Joyce Buckley for scoring a soundtrack specially for this exhibition.
Going for B'roque - Jennifer Delilah, Claudia Hart, John Wellington February 13–March 15, 2009
The paintings of John Wellington and Jennifer Delilah and the new media paintings and sculptures of Claudia Hart do indeed go Baroque...just as quickly as they depart from it. Each circles back to this pivotal period of art history to examine more deeply the predicaments of our own cultural moment
If you enjoy paintings of passion, anxiety and obsession, masterfully and provocatively time-warped, this is the show for you. Experience curious historical leaps back and forth across the centuries, as tidy categories of period style, medium and subject come unraveled. Power once expressed itself in the theatrically ennobled grandeur of Baroque painting, sculpture and architecture. Each of the works in this show painstakingly evokes the gorgeous pretenses of the style—only to then drag them through our very contemporary anxieties to create puzzling time twists that both charm and alarm us.
When the great empires of Europe fell, so too did their gods. Now, ideas of erotic rapture and superhuman heroism have gone into retreat, hanging on in our unconscious realm of dreams and fantasy, popping up in gaudy pulp schmaltz and delusional conceits. Here, in this show, they appear to reign; but in this contemporary context—where modern society aspires to impart dignity to all humanity, including the disempowered—the ruse quickly falls away. This is our world in our time, under the ominous weight of the past, and new institutions of power that refuse to surrender.
JOHN WELLINGTON How did those Japanese schoolgirls from the Internet get into John Wellington's grandiose paintings? He seduces us with luscious layers of phenomenal old-master oil technique, showing us stormily Romantic landscapes and authoritarian monuments in ruin—sites seemingly abandoned...except for the schoolgirls, very much preoccupied with themselves, innocent and oblivious, and cute—and only vaguely apprehensive that the ancient gods that might well return. Words in the paintings share their thoughts: One fears she is bait.
JENNIFER DELILAH Delilah offers up a pair of large, light and airy, profusely detailed follies centered on the child king Louis XIV of France (1638–1715). They take place in a grand room in the palace of Versailles, with the floor as an antique map of the world, falling away into the foreground. The architecture supports a massive framework of images: but Delilah has traded out the original pompously idealizing frescoes for depictions of imperial power as seen from the other side—drawings of slave life in the colonial Caribbean, Civil War and Antebellum-period drawings, Baroque pornography, and Orientalist and Old Master paintings. She depicts the royal lad, front and center, playing on the floor with toy soldiers and oil wells. He is oblivious to the real consequences of his every move. It is all a game, as much for us as for him, as hidden clues and jokes abound. The whole is like a cineplex barrage of eras, that underscores our own lack of historical consciousness.
CLAUDIA HART Claudia Hart also concerns herself with gender representations of power, as we have inherited them down through the history of art. Her Mortification sculptures of women leaning back as in divine throes of pleasure/pain recall Bernini's famous Baroque sculpture of the Ecstasies of St. Theresa. Their resemblance to carved alabaster is an illusion. These are her 3-D scans of real nudes, digitally mutilated with organic deformations, and fabricated in plastic from a rapid prototype machine. The sensuously expressive facture is a byproduct of cutting-edge modern technique.
Similarly, the vacant death stare of Ophelia, a common subject among the Pre-Raphaelite painters, was laden with necrophiliac overtones. Hart's version, a framed work, styled with seductive sensuosity, looks in many respects like a painting. But it's digital and it moves—like a painting would, if it could, in tune to the slow, rhythmic undulations of the underwater tides in which she drowns. These new media works look at the dubious historical role of the female subject as the locus of connection with the divine—and by extension, the male pornographic fascination. She notes that the new techno-arena in which she works is mainly a male-dominated institution, and that hers is a sort of "Romantic Rebellion against our technocratic and bureaucratic culture." Her strategic mismatch of new media technique and historic content upsets the naturalized order of each.
Robert Ladislas Derr Structures and Strictures Opening: Friday, March 20 , 7–9pm March 20–April 19 , 2009
The works of performance artist Robert Ladislas Derr are spare, subdued and smart. They are also witty, dry and even sometimes funny. In “Structures and Strictures,” he features three pared–down video documentations of his performances—along with accompanying photographs.
In each work, Derr uses his active body to bring focus to the abstract structures and strictures of a site. Cerebral and quiet formal explorations on the one hand, they also metaphorically express the artist's existential searching for a connection with society and himself.
Concrete Intervention is a two-channel video of the artist repeatedly crawling through a pair of concrete culverts. His movements are defined by the round, constricted shape of the space. Breaking down the wider environment to a simple structure, it conveys the monotony of daily life. His repetitions allude to the daily cycle that we repeat each and every day.
In the second two-channel video Existential Dilemma , Derr and his wife appear flipping around inside the containment of adjacent cubes. Here, he's thinking about another aspect of the human condition: No matter how hard we try to be close to another human being, we will always be separated both psychologically and physiologically.
I don't give a shit about the masses is a durational video performance showing Derr in the forest, struggling to hold a headstand against a tree. Breaking a gender specific way of seeing Mother Nature in art, he identifies the art historical structure of landscape nudes that have traditionally been female. Derr is “lost in the wilderness” (a notion he borrows from Thoreau). In exile, alone in the woods and away from the distraction of the masses and their collective insanities, he literally turns his world upside-down. He is trying to remember himself.
Robert Ladislas Derr has performed and exhibited worldwide. This is his second New York solo show. Derr received an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and is an assistant professor of photography at The Ohio State University.
