September 14 – October 26, 2008 Opening reception: Sunday, September 14, 3 – 6 pm
Curated by: Candice Madey and Tairone Bastien
On September 14, 2008, On Stellar Rays, a contemporary art gallery, will open at 133 Orchard Street on the Lower East Side of New York. The inaugural exhibition, A Seer Out of Season, presents works by Danny Jauregui, Dave McDermott, Elizabeth Neel, Alessandro Pessoli, Tia Pulitzer and Georgia Sagri, in a range of media including painting, drawing, sculpture, installation, performance and video.
The artists in A Seer Out of Season draw from a deep and ancient well of cultural symbols, characters and myths to create works that investigate the effects of a past that is increasingly ever-present. Shamans, mummies, crusaders, totems, and images of primeval landscapes are abstracted, erased, edited and obscured creating a palimpsest of seen and unseen phenomena in the exhibition. Jauregui will present an expansive wall drawing, nearly invisible in ghostly shades of white, and paintings, employing interstitial lines of black ash and negative space to evoke perished sites of collective trauma. In Sagri’s video, real time is edited, spliced, expanded and looped. Both artists encourage consideration of missing and discontinuous time and space. A similarly clairvoyant vision is operative in McDermott’s drawings, in which the artist conjures totemic forms from the grainy depths of his photographic source material, and in Neel’s paintings, in which anthropological sources are transformed and abstracted to rise then fall from view, defying the scientific and clinical precision of the images’ source with lushly rendered surfaces. Equally intuitive are Pessoli’s fantastical works on paper, in which the artist applies bleach to intense fields of color creating alien landscapes, alternate realities aligned with our own, but slightly off-key. Finally, standing in contrapposto in the center of the room is Pulitzer’s Psychic, a dark and seductive figure that evokes the knowing presence of someone who is without sight but sees.
On Stellar Rays will feature artists experimenting across media, often incorporating performance, sound, film and video with more traditional media. A program of film screenings, lectures and performance will be presented in conjunction with exhibitions. The second exhibition, and the gallery’s first solo, will present photo-based work and a new performance by Clifford Owens.
