Check it out:
New work by Carrie Yamaoka, on view at Aeroplastics Contemporary in Brussels, on view until April 4th, 2004.
Sandow Birk's second Dante series on view at Catharine Clark Gallery in San Francisco.
We still have Amy Jean Porter drawings available at the gallery; read about them in New York magazine.
We're pleased to announce the inclusion of Emily Jacir in the 2004 Whitney Biennial. Also, a new review of her work in The Washington Post.
Hilarious interview with Stefanie Nagorka, Home Depot sculptor, on NPR's All Things Considered.
Sandow Birk's Dante's Inferno is available for viewing on request. The gorgeous book is in an edition of 100. More information over at Trillium Press.
Until July 27th, you can see Nina Katchadourian's spider video Gift/Gift at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia.
In the June 2003 Art in America, great review of Nina Katchadourian's most recent show here -- a "suberb...presentation [...] a ridiculously fun experiment."
Emily Jacir in Rainer Ganahl's private/public, through June 27th, in Munich at Häusler Contemporary, in Made in Palestine at the Art Car Museum in Houston, and here in New York in Homeland, the Whitney ISP's exhibition at the CUNY Graduate Center.
Many of the reviews are in: read about our most recent exhibition by Emily Jacir: "One of the most moving gallery exhibitions I've encountered this season." -- Holland Cotter, New York Times
Joy Episalla
For the Birds
February 26, 2004 -- April 9, 2004
Debs & Co. is pleased to present For the Birds, an exhibition of photographs
and video by Joy Episalla. For the Birds will be Ms. Episalla's tenth solo
exhibition, her fourth with Debs & Co.
In For the Birds, Ms. Episalla explores the wilds of her back yard, and the
Wonderland of friends' bookshelves, engaging the viewer in a baroque
exploration of person and place, a tour of Alice's underground. For the
Birds plays with and blurs the boundaries between photography, video and
sculpture, natural, cultural and personal. Whereas her previous work more
explicitly references the absent figure within its physical setting, For the
Birds is more highly abstracted in its depiction of the structures with
which people surround and define themselves.
In her single channel video For the Birds, Ms. Episalla has shot an immense
ivy plant and its inhabitants, and projects the seemingly static image onto
the back wall of the gallery. At first glance, the vine is extraordinarily
still, the slightly larger-than-life leaves placidly floating against the
brick wall of Ms. Episalla's garden. With a few moments inspection, however,
we see the ivy burst into activity and life; the slightest breath of wind,
and the movements of the animals within the curlings of the plant causing a
shimmering and shining of greenish black waves. The chirping, humming,
flittering and flocking of the avian ivy-dwellers within their vegetal
apartment building references structures and domiciles of all kinds.
In Ivy # 3, also taken in the artist's garden, Ms. Episalla flips the ivy
from the wall to the floor, and the action is presented in three dimensions
rather than four. As in her previous floor-photographs of purses, Ivy #3
shows a rim of substance disappearing into black; in this case, the darkness
in the center of the frame reveals nothing so much as the rabbit hole entry
to Alice's underground. The notion of passage is important in Ms.
Episalla's work, both figuratively and literally; movement from place to
place, from past to present to future, from life to death. Ivy# 3 invites
the viewer to jump, like Alice, into the black hole to see what lurks beyond
sight.
A hint of what we might find there is seen in the two works, Portrait of
FM, showing a bookshelf represented on a large scrim, and, Bookcase #1,
showing a series of books neatly exploded out of scale. Portrait represents
a deceased friend's bookshelf as a defining attribute of personality. As
light both passes through the scrim and is reflected by it, the titles of
the books float between presence and absence, and are themselves figurative
rabbit holes that are invitations to further inquiry. In Bookcase #1 the
cultural significance of books is presented as monolithic goofiness; both
exploded way beyond "natural" height and width, the bound copies of the
periodical are simultaneously squished to the approximate two-inch depth of
the plexi. Bookcase #1 appears as a macroscopic microscope slide standing
on end. This monolith of information speaks of undifferentiated culture, as
opposed to the personalized and personalizing cultural artifacts of
Portrait. These alternatives bookend the exhibition, and invite a meditation
on the Wonderland-like transformations that the mind makes of received and
perceived information.
Joy Episalla has recently had one-person exhibitions at Studio 1.1 in
London, Clifford-Smith Gallery in Boston, the Visual Studies Workshop in
Rochester, and the Phoenix Art Museum. Her work has most recently been
included in the group exhibitions Hot House at the New York Academy of
Sciences (curated by Mary Jo Vath), Pretty as a Picture: Beauty and Banality
in Contemporary Art at Carrie Secrist Gallery, Chicago and Snapshot at the
Aldrich Museum, Ridgefield CT. Ms. Episalla is a 2003 recipient of The Louis
Comfort Tiffany Grant; she lives and works in New York.
Debs & Co. 525 West 26th Street, Second Floor, New York, NY 10001. 212.643.2070.
info@debsandco.com
