January 26 - February 28, 2025
Cyrilla Mozenter - Problems of Art | Michael Dumontier | Andreas Exner - PEBEO STUDIO | Celeste Fichter - Chat Room
OPENING RECEPTION - SUNDAY, JANUARY 26, 1- 4pm
WAITING ROOM
Cyrilla Mozenter - Problems of Art
Problems of Art is a selection of hand stitched industrial wool felt freestanding and wall works made in a twenty year span.
The process of making throughout is improvisational. Hand stitching wool felt creates stress. The felt buckles, torques, droops, and stretches in unpredictable response, requiring attentiveness, flexibility, as well as a sense of playful adventure in ever-changing circumstance. The suspense of the process applies not only to form but also to color. As felt shapes are stitched together, cut edges soften and meld, shadows between disappear. Color relationships may shift dramatically. What looks harsh or dissonant at one moment in the process, transforms to harmonious in another.
Felt is a textile of ancient origin made from matted and consolidated tangles of animal fur suggesting compressed chaos. Unlike the grid of woven, felt is the fabric of irrationality. An insulator, the felt I use is thick, dense, and quieting—soft to the touch, with a matte, impressionable, non-reflective surface. The silk thread with which I stitch, is lustrous, refined. Both materials derive from creatures.
The earlier freestanding works are from More saints seen, shown in a grouping of 30 primarily vessel forms, suggestive of sacred ritual objects, and with related works on paper at the Aldrich Museum in 2005. They are made with cream-color felt (with small touches of black or grey), pencil marked and studded with toothpicks, wooden ice cream spoons, buttons, pearls, and beads. While felt absorbs liquid, vessels by definition are able to contain it. These vessels cannot function as such, but instead have an absurd pale presence, that of ghosts or resurrected memories of these elemental and essential forms.
More recent felt wall works involve the transplantation of cutout letters, letter-derived, and pictogram-like shapes that serve to activate irregularly shaped felt 'grounds' suggesting flags, banners, and pennants. In the works on exhibition, some of the letter forms are not overt, informing the contour of a shape in one instance or in absence as a letter-shaped open space in another. Like the 'saints,' the inlaid shapes are iconic and, in this context, can bring to mind medieval heraldry. The wall works are not flat; they hover in a space between two and three dimensions. Shapes are cut out and then inlaid (and stitched) into position not unlike marquetry, requiring exactness. The spiraling tension of the hand stitching causes subtle dimensional flare-ups that further animate the work. A doomed attempt at regularity, the stitching is in opposition to the chaos that is felt. It is a form of physical drawing. Much of the work begins with cast-offs or remains of earlier pieces: cutout shapes and the grounds from which they have been cut with untidy edges 'as is' suggesting history and the desire for repair and renewal.
Cyrilla Mozenter is known for her gouache-painted, pencil-drawn (and written) works on paper and hand stitched industrial wool felt pieces that include the transplantation of cutout letters, letter-derived and pictogram-like shapes. A Guggenheim Fellow, Mozenter has shown extensively in galleries and museums, including solo exhibitions at The Drawing Center and the Aldrich Museum. She has produced two collaborative books with photographer/writer Philip Perkis. Her work is in numerous public collections including the Brooklyn Museum and the Yale University Art Gallery. She taught for many years in the MFA program at Pratt Institute.
AL’S OFFICE
Michael Dumontier
From an ongoing series of handmade leaves–cut from aluminum, drilled, bent, and painted by the artist. 35 are shown: hung from nails, like tiny branches, or pins displaying specimens. A population: decayed/eaten away, revealing patterns and constellations, but still vivid, unique, and individual.
Michael Dumontier co-founded The Royal Art Lodge collective in 1996 and continued as a member until 2008, along with Marcel Dzama and Neil Farber. Solo presentations for the Royal Art Lodge have been held at the Liverpool Biennial; the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; The Drawing Center, New York; and The Power Plant, Toronto. Dumontier maintains a collaborative practice with Neil Farber, meeting every Wednesday evening to collaborate on paintings, drawings, and writing. In 2014, they were shortlisted for the Sobey Art Award. Work by Michael Dumontier can be found in numerous private and public collections including the Vancouver Art Gallery and the National Gallery of Canada, and solo exhibitions for the artist have been held in New York, Padua (Italy), Boston, Winnipeg, and Montréal. Most recently, his work was acquired and installed at the brand new Delta One Lounge at JFK Airport, NY, NY.
AL’S OFFICE
Andreas Exner - PEBEO STUDIO
The current exhibition ANDREAS EXNER: PEBEO STUDIO KADMIUM ZITRONEN GELB VW GOLF 1.6 features eight photographs of site-specific installations of the APPLIED MONOCHROME PAINTING series, realized in Frankfurt (G), Bordeaux (F), Groningen (NL), Aschaffenburg (G) and Melbourne (AUS).
In his work, Andreas Exner merges the contemplation of painting with the perception of everyday life, transforming realms of art into ordinary living spaces and vice versa. Exner utilizes everyday objects in his search for color, consistently exploring the dialogue between painting and sculpture. The result is a body of work that decisively reinvents abstract painting, embedding it in public spaces, defining its relevance in the present.
In Exners APPLIED MONOCHROME PAINTING series (with titles such as Matisse Emerald Triumph Herald, Carbon Black Porsche Carrera, Derivan Matisse Australian Blue Gum Citroën C3), the artist references key moments in art history and questions their legacy in the context of today’s consumer world—opening spaces for thought. “Often, these works create new meaning or evoke memory. Committed to the concept of ‘painting in the expanded field,’ Andreas Exner’s works oscillate between painting, sculpture, and context-based installation art. In these pieces, monochrome color fields are fitted into the side windows of cars and displayed in public spaces along roadsides, turning the vehicles into ‘monochrome supportive’ readymades,” explains Leni Hoffmann.
In his latest installation, LASCAUX MAGENTA OPEL ASTRA CARAVAN, presented in Trier, Germany, Exner once again incorporates the everyday object of the car into his installation, redefining the street space outside the gallery as part of the exhibition. The world beyond the large display windows facing Karl-Marx-Straße is visually integrated into the exhibition, just as the gallery space itself can become part of the field of vision for any passerby. It is we who, with our awareness of the transparent object that is the “window,” distinguish the interior from the exterior—and who assign meaning to the separation between inside and outside.
Andreas Exner studied painting at the Städel Academy of Fine Arts in Frankfurt and has exhibited internationally since 1990.
MELANIE’S OFFICE
Celeste Fichter - Chat Room
With insight and a quiet deadpan humor, Celeste Fichter’s inventive work encourages the viewer to see the world sideways – where the dominant culture that dictates value is not in charge. Embracing what the mainstream casts aside as unimportant, her work insists that significance is in the eye of the beholder and the hands of the maker. Influenced by Arte Povera, Fluxus, Duchamp and the life inherent in humble subjects and readymade materials, she makes work that incorporates photography, video, found objects, collage, installation, multiples and artists books to give voice to the mundane and celebrates the everydayness of things.
"Chat Room is an ongoing project where I make connections and build relationships between unrelated subjects. Acting as a matchmaker of materials, I gather images and found objects from multiple analog and digital sources until I spot potential relationships.
I pair elements based on formal considerations (shape, color, pattern) and content (meaning, function, symbolism). My starting point is often a made or found image that I treat as an object. Baked Alaska, for example, is comprised of a discolored photograph of an erupting volcano paired with a hardboard corner (used to square stretcher bars) covered with red rosin paper (used to protect flooring). The triangular shape of the volcano is mirrored above the inverse triangular shape of the corner. Blue and yellow have faded from the photograph leaving it the same shade of magenta as the rosin paper. The formal simpatico of a shared geometry and color create the chemistry that draw these two together in a union that hints at something greater than the sum of its parts. By putting objects that have nothing in common, in common, new alliances are created and matches are made.
Though each work is created one at a time, associations among works often arise and unexpected conversations emerge. I like to think of these as group chats, and the walls where the works live as a chat room – a sort of meeting place. When installed, the groupings are choreographed in the space to further reveal to the viewer an unfamiliar universe, despite its familiar components."
Celeste Fichter holds an MFA in Photography and Related Media from the School of Visual Arts in New York City. She has had solo exhibitions at SIDE Door Presents (NY), 57W57 Arts (NYC), Point of Contact Gallery at Syracuse University, Go North Gallery (Beacon, NY), PH Gallery (NYC), and the Boyden Gallery at St Mary's College, MD. Her work has been in group exhibitions at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Islip Art Museum, and the Bronx Museum of Art. Her work has been reviewed in the New York Times and the Village Voice. She lives and works in Brooklyn.
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