Currently on view at Debs & Co.:
Emily Jacir
Where We Come From
Extended! Through May 23rd, 2003
Debs & Co. is a contemporary art gallery. We exhibit emerging and
mid-career artists, with an emphasis on politically relevant work.
The gallery is located at 525 W. 26th Street, 2nd Floor, New York City.
We are open to the public Tuesday through Saturday, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m.
After our current exhibition, the gallery will end the season with the group show The World's A Mess, It's In My Kiss. We will be closed from mid-July until Labor Day. In addition, we will be closed Saturdays in July.
Our most recent exhibitions:
Aaron Cobbett
Nina Katchadourian
Carrie Moyer
Stefanie Nagorka
Sandow Birk
Other recent shows:
Joy Episalla
Tony Gray
Dominic McGill
Carrie Yamaoka
For information on our other artists and previous exhibitions, enter the main site.
Here's a panoramic (and horridly montaged) view of our booth at Arco 2003, Madrid. (Work by Dominic McGill, Joy Episalla, and Rina Banerjee).
Please drop us an email with any questions.
Emily Jacir
Debs & Company
525 West 26th Street, Chelsea
Through May 17
Emily Jacir was born in Palestine in 1970, grew up in the United States, and now divides her time between the two countries. With her American passport, she can leave and re-enter Palestine freely and move between Palestine and Israel, though many Palestinians cannot. In response to these restrictions, Ms. Jacir contacted a number of Palestinians and presented them with a question: "If I could do something for you, anywhere in Palestine, what would it be?" She then tried to carry out their wishes.
The spare Debs show is a document of the results. The original requests are presented as English and Arabic text panels; accompaning photographs record missions accomplished. Some of the requests were practical (pay a bill I owe, bring gifts to my family). Others were sentimental (water a tree in my village, have sweets at a certain shop). Others were deeply personal.
A man named Munir asked her to place flowers on his mother's grave in Jerusalem, which he had been denied persmission to visit. (When she went to the grave, Ms. Jacir notes in a footnote, she found a group of tourists standing around a grave nearby, which turned out to be that of Oskar Schindler.) Another man asks her to go to the Holy Sepulcher church and to al-Aqsa mosque and say a prayer for peace at each. A third writes: "Visit my mother, hug and kiss her and tell her that these are from her son. Visit the sea at sunset and smell it for me and walk a little bit . . . enough. Am I too greedy?" The artist clearly didn't think so. She did as he asked, and brought back evidence in the form of the straightforward, snapshot-style pictures that are on view here.
Ms. Jacir, who was in "Greater New York" at P.S. 1, has produced stimulating work in the last few years, shown at the Queens Museum of Art and elsewhere. But "Where We Come From" is her best so far. An art of cool Conceptual surfaces and ardent, intimate gestures, intensely political and beyond polemic, it adds up to one of the most moving gallery exhibitions I've encountered this season.
HOLLAND COTTER
