a very, very long cat

January 14 – February 13, 2010 Opening Thursday January 14th 6-8pm “You see, wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat. You pull his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. Do you understand this? And radio operates exactly the same way: you send signals here, they r... Read more

January 14 – February 13, 2010
Opening Thursday January 14th 6-8pm
“You see, wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat. You pull his
tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. Do you understand
this? And radio operates exactly the same way: you send signals here, they
receive them there. The only difference is that there is no cat." — Albert
Einstein
“a very, very long cat” brings together artists residing in Berlin, London
and Los Angeles whose work is concerned with transmission — the conveyance
of ideas, memories and objects across distances long and short. Some
approach these issues indexically, making objects that register their
displacement (Beshty, Rees), while others use performance to address the
complexity inherent in representing the past in the present (Beier and Lund,
Smith). In a broader sense, the artists here explore the structures that
facilitate the communication of ideas, with the aim of creating a causal, if
not always direct, relationship between thought and the form it assumes.
Dan Rees (b. 1982, United Kingdom; lives Berlin) will contribute a new, sitespecific
piece from a series of monoprint painting installations. Rees
applies paint directly to a canvas and then presses it against the gallery
wall, leaving a mirrored imprint. The two parts are exhibited as one piece,
articulating in physical space the distance between the original painting and
its reproduction.
Sean Edwards (b. 1980, United Kingdom; lives Wales) uses ephemeral,
commonplace objects as the starting point for his sculptural works, which
often contrast his everyday sources with traditional artistic materials like
bronze and oil paint. Edwards will show a painting of an RS box (RS is an
electrical company in London which, aside from having very appealing boxes,
claims to be able to supply “any part for any job”). The artist likens his
boxes to the Barres de bois ronds (Round Bars of Wood) sculptures that André
Cadere made and exhibited from 1970-1978, in that they are deployed (and
redeployed) in various exhibition contexts, and bear the marks of their
imagined use - the box’s fetishized object-surface gets older and more
dilapidated with each consecutive painting.
Ian Law (b. 1984, United Kingdom; lives London) is a recent graduate of The
Royal College in London, where he developed a conceptual painting practice
that builds chance, performance and duration into its logic. As Law notes,
Wallspace 619 West 27 Street New York, New York 10001 t + 1 212 594 9478 f + 1 212 594 9805 info@wallspacegallery.com
his “pieces are worked in relation to others, to then be cast elsewhere or
used in some other way.” He talks about his interest in “a process that is
activity.” Recent works have been based on re-learning how to somersault or
reconsidering the thought process involved in making monochromatic paintings.
In most cases, each grouping of works follows directly from the previous, as
in Ambulant (2009), a sculpture comprised of a stack of newspapers that finds
a second life in Clears (2009), a series of paintings made to the size and
format of the newspapers in the previous work.
Walead Beshty (b. 1976, United Kingdom; lives Los Angeles) will contribute
works from his ongoing Fedex© series (2008-ongoing), in which he fabricates
glass or copper boxes that are the exact dimensions of standard Fedex©
shipping boxes, and then ships these via Fedex©. The handling and damage
accrued during shipment-from the fingerprints of the delivery people, to
scratches and dents sustained en route, to the continuous addition of
shipping labels over time—become concrete manifestations of movements
typically obscured or repressed in the transit and distribution of art
objects.
Similarly, Nina Beier (b. 1976, Denmark; lives Berlin and London) and Marie
Lund (b. 1975, Denmark; lives Berlin and London) reveal elements usually kept
hidden within an exhibition context. For Autobiography (If these walls could
speak) (2010), the gallery staff has been asked to excavate all the spackled
holes in the walls made from hanging artwork in previous exhibitions,
following only their own memory. The history of the gallery is communicated
through that tiny distance between the painted surface and the holes just
beneath – a very, very short cat. For Imprint (2010), the gallery staff has
memorized descriptions of artworks the curator wanted to include in the
exhibition but was not able to. If any visitor inquires, the sitter will
transmit these descriptions, which will necessarily vary with the each
retelling.
John Smith (b. 1952, United Kingdom; lives London) will show a significant
film from the early 80s called Shepherd’s Delight: an analysis of humour
(1980-1984), which attempts to trace the etymology of the well-known saying,
“Red sky at morning, shepherds take warning; red sky at night, shepherds’
delight,” through a series of analyses that run from the explanatory to the
absurd. Smith’s films exploit “the opposition of illusionism and materiality,
the key motif of the post-war avant-garde cinema…used here and elsewhere in
his work to underpin subtle questioning and undercutting of the authority of
the word,”1 occupying the distance between a text and its interpretation.
Smith is a well-known figure in Britain, but is rarely exhibited in the US. A
retrospective of his work in film and video was held at the 2007 Venice
Biennale.
Alexandre da Cunha (b. 1969, Brazil; lives London) repurposes mundane, often
domestic objects (mops, plungers, baking sheets) into modernist-inspired
sculptural configurations that underscore the objects’ often overlooked
formal qualities. As Jens Hoffman notes, “da Cunha improvises on the concept
of the readymade by reusing everyday objects in ways that reflect on those
objects’ specific histories and aesthetics.” For this exhibition, he will
show Club Sandwich (2008), a mobile constructed from baking tins whose
kinetic form refuses a fixed state, transmitting perpetually shifting signals
and readings.
1 A.L. Rees, “Art in Cinema,” National Film Theatre, London, 1987
Wallspace 619 West 27 Street New York, New York 10001 t + 1 212 594 9478 f + 1 212 594 9805 info@wallspacegallery.com
Kerry Tribe’s (b. 1973, United States; lives Berlin and Los Angeles)
explorations in film, video and installation form an ongoing investigation
into memory, subjectivity and doubt. Tribe, who lives and works in Los
Angeles, will exhibit letterpress prints from her H.M. project (2009), part
of which will be shown in the upcoming 2010 Whitney Biennial, and which was a
driving force in the organization of this show. The centerpiece of the H.M.
project is a two-channel presentation of a single film based on the true
story of an anonymous, memory-impaired man, a famous amnesiac known in
scientific literature only as “Patient H.M.” In 1953, when he was 27 years
old, H.M. underwent experimental brain surgery intended to alleviate his
epilepsy, the unintended result of which was a radical and persistent
amnesia. Though he was no longer able to make lasting memories, his shortterm
recall, lasting about 20 seconds, remained intact. He lived anonymously
in this condition for more than half a century until his death on December 2,
2008. His case is widely credited with revolutionizing our understanding of
the organization of human memory. The genius of Tribe’s piece lies in a
simple formal gesture: the second screen of the projection plays the same
footage as the first, but lagging 20 seconds behind, thereby mirroring the
patient’s brain glitch and giving it both a formal equivalent and a palpable
emotional immediacy. The works on view at first glance appear abstract, but
on closer inspection we learn that their form is based on crossword puzzles
published between the onset of H.M.’s amnesia and his death.
Like all of the works in “a very, very long cat,” Tribe’s piece gives form to
the spaces between — between what we know and that which we’ve forgotten,
between here and there, between the teller and the told – and draw attention
to what accrues and what is lost along the way.
*
“a very, very long cat” is organized by Jane Hait and is made possible
through the generous collaboration of the participating artists and Laura
Lord, David Thain and Rachel Williams at Vilma Gold; Tanya Leighton; Laura
Bartlett; Brian Butler. With special thanks to David Zwirner Gallery and
Peter Eleey.
For more information or for images