CHRISTINA RAY (formerly Glowlab) Announces Gallery Name Change and Group Exhibition Refresh.
Glowlab founder and gallery Director Christina Ray changes the name of her gallery to CHRISTINA RAY. The gallery remains in its SoHo location with the same program and artists. The re-launch is celebrated with a group exhibition titled “Refresh” opening March 04 with a reception on March 18.
New York, NY – February 22, 2010 – Christina Ray, founder of the experimental gallery Glowlab, announces the re-launch of the gallery under her own name. The transition underscores Ray’s renewed commitment to contemporary art that examines the nature and psychology of the built environment. Refresh, the title of the first exhibition at CHRISTINA RAY, takes its name from the title of a work in the group show by artist Jim Ringley. Additional artists include Paloma Crousillat, Gregory Euclide, Pablo Helguera, Alice Jarry, Matthew Northridge and Jill Sylvia. The gallery remains at its current location at 30 Grand Street and the exhibition is on view March 04–April 18, with a public reception on Thursday, March 18, 7–9pm.
Ray states, “I’m thrilled to celebrate this moment in the growth of our program as we head into spring featuring new artists in the gallery and preparing to exhibit with the upcoming Pulse and Fountain art fairs. As we evolve, our mission remains to discover and present the most important contemporary artwork that explores the concept of psychogeography by re-imagining the relationships between people and places.”
Artists featured in Refresh share a common interest in the boundaries between psychological and physical space. In the title piece of the exhibition, California artist Jim Ringley’s highway scene depicts a car racing away from the viewer. While the image appears to offer the hope of a quick escape into a promising future, the picture plane remains still beneath its effervescent surface. Paloma Crousillat similarly extends the viewer’s focus into a space of imagination with her hard-edged renderings of large-scale telescopes. Born in Lima, Peru and based in Brooklyn, Crousillat’s work is informed by the systems and frameworks of space, language and beliefs.
Gregory Euclide, whose work will be exhibited for the first time at the gallery, is an artist and teacher living in the Twin Cities region of Minnesota. Knowledge gained in childhood of the complexity and interconnectedness of his rural environment grounds his appreciation for contemplative experiences in nature. Euclide’s three-dimensional works break through the flat surface of traditional landscape paintings and include media as diverse as cassette tapes, moss, ribbon and lead.
Pablo Helguera, a New York-based artist working in installation, sculpture, photography, drawing, and performance presents work in collage that questions the cultural, historical and social relationships between reality and fiction. Helguera has exhibited and performed internationally, and notably in New York at the Brooklyn and Bronx Museums of Art, P.S.1 and El Museo del Barrio. Montreal artist Alice Jarry’s multi-layered silkscreen works on paper also hover on the border between landscape and imagination, where motifs and found archival images come together in a richly-textured series of dreamy, portentous compositions.
Matthew Northridge and Jill Sylvia round out the list of artists in Refresh. Both artists are new to the gallery and will present works on paper along with sculptural installations. Northridge, whose work has been exhibited at museums including the New Museum of Contemporary Art, the Brooklyn Museum of Art and the National Academy Museum, presents two new pieces incorporating maps that examine scale, compression and rules governing spatial systems. His work has recently been acquired by the Hirshhorn Museum. San Francisco-based artist Sylvia uses a drafting knife to painstakingly remove the cells of traditional ledger paper, leaving behind a delicate lattice expressing time and the futility of labor. The flat, empty grids turn three-dimensional as the artist re-organizes them into spatial constructions in which the notion of value confronts the void.
CHRISTINA RAY is an innovative gallery and creative catalyst in New York whose mission, grounded by the concept of psychogeography, is to discover and present the most important contemporary artwork exploring the relationship between people and places.
