YANCEY RICHARDSON GALLERY
535 West 22nd Street 3rd floor
NY 10011
New York, NY
New York
North America
p: 1 646-230-9610
m:
f: 1 646-230-6131
w: www.yanceyrichardson.com
Rachel Perry Welty China Cabinet, 2009, Ballpoint ink on Styrofoam, Plexiglas shelf, 36 x 36 x 23 inches
The Yancey Richardson Gallery is pleased to present You May Already Be A Winner, an exhibition of drawings, sculpture, and video by Boston-based artist Rachel Perry Welty. Utilizing disparate materials such as produce stickers, aluminum foil, sell-by-date bread tags, answering machine messages, and Styrofoam takeout containers, Welty transforms the detritus of daily life into conceptually witty commentaries on issues of consumption, commerce, communication and domestic routine.
With a sharp eye for the aesthetic possibilities of everyday refuse, Welty uses familiar materials in startling ways. Her drawings, made from used fruit stickers she obsessively collects, slices and arranges into zany geometric abstractions, combine Minimalist aesthetics with Pop humor. The abstract spiraling shapes suggest both the circuitous journey produce makes from point of origin to consumer and the endless cycle of daily food consumption. As she states: �We shop, eat, sleep and then get up and do it all over again.� Welty sees the stickers as visual remnants rich with information - economic, political, geographic and social. In the wall sculpture Daily Bread, Welty organized seven years of bread tags collected in the kitchen drawer into a pastel grid to form a calendar of her family�s bread consumption.
Throughout her career, Welty has used various forms of communication as both material and subject matter. The video Karaoke Wrong Number features the artist expertly lip-synching wrong number messages left inadvertently on her answering machine over a two year period. With performances both funny and poignant, Welty conjures a variety of personalities and touches upon issues of privacy, identity, expectation and assumption. For her Spam Message wall sculptures, Welty uses a single sheet of aluminum foil, crushed and formed by hand into words, to immortalize the accidental bits of poetry sent through cyberspace by strangers to unknown recipients. About the piece You May Already Be a Winner, Welty comments, "I was struck by the sheer possibility suggested by these words. Taken out of context... the words become something hopeful and beautiful."
In an ironic take on the narcissism pervading contemporary society, Welty recreated tiny versions of shopping bags by Prada, Chanel and Fendi in perfect miniature facsimile. Her sculpture Little Luxuries speaks to the diminishment of luxury brand status in today's fraught economy and probes the questionable benefit of material abundance. Thinking of You, Too, a mirror cut in the shape of a cartoonist�s thought bubble, playfully addresses the egoistic assumption that we are always reflected in the thoughts of others, playing the lead role in the ongoing drama of daily life where I am thinking of you, but only insofar as you are thinking of me.
Born in 1962, Welty lives and works in Boston and New York. Her work has recently been exhibited at the Drawing Center, New York, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, (where she was a finalist for the Foster prize), the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, the Krannert Art Museum and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. In 2008, Welty was featured in the exhibition Transformed at the Contemporary Art Center of Virginia with Tara Donovan and Tom Friedman.
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17 August - 27 October 2013
David Renggli - in some respects a prodigy of the Swiss art scene - has repeatedly aroused the curiosity of the public for more than ten years thanks to a unique mixture of themes and forms, of spectacle, humour and poetry.
The Showroom, London presents Ricardo Basbaum: re-projecting (london)
12 July - 17 August 2013
The Showroom is delighted to present re-projecting (london), a major new commission by Brazilian artist Ricardo Basbaum, and the first significant presentation of his internationally renowned artwork in the UK.
