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.



Our most recent exhibitions:

Amy Jean Porter

The World's A Mess...

Emily Jacir

Aaron Cobbett

Nina Katchadourian

Carrie Moyer

Stefanie Nagorka

Sandow Birk

Other recent shows:

Joy Episalla

Tony Gray

Dominic McGill

Carrie Yamaoka



We are open to the public Tuesday through Saturday, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. We will be closed from mid-July until Labor Day. In addition, we will be closed Saturdays in July.



For information on other artists and previous exhibitions, poke around our archives (flash required).



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.

Check it out:



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. Ms. Jacir will present new work at the New Art Dealers Association Fair in Miami, running concurrently with Art Basel/Miami in December.



Now available at the gallery: J'aime la Nature: A Blueprint for Asymetric Threats in Rhyme, a full color 'zine in a signed and numbered edition of 30, with text by Chris Habib and images by Libby McInnis. Comes with your choice of hand-printed t-shirt or tote bag! $60.00, come and get it.



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

CHUCK NANNEY
MORE SONGS ABOUT SEX AND DEATH
OCTOBER 23rd -- NOVEMBER 29th, 2003
OPENING RECEPTION: 6 to 8 p.m., Saturday, October 25th, 2003


Debs & Co. is pleased to present More Songs About Sex and Death, an exhibition of sculpture, drawing, and audio by Chuck Nanney. More Songs About Sex and Death will be Mr. Nanney's 16th solo exhibition and his third with Debs & Co. The show will run concurrently with a solo exhibition at Drake University's Anderson Gallery in Des Moines, Iowa and a group exhibition at Team Gallery in Chelsea.

Old Sparky is a corrugated cardboard version of the electric chair favored for executions -- and named -- by Florida Governor Jeb Bush. Somewhere between doll-size and actual scale, Nanney's Old Sparky is a truly creepy reminder of that hateful disjuncture between reality and perception so embedded in the American psyche. At the same time, the two chairs -- the "real" Sparky and Nanney's -- are a distressing twin-star system representing the impotence of art in the face of systematized brutality and ignorance; not up to snuff, the cardboard chair is "useless" as object and antidote.

In his other recent work, Mr. Nanney continues his use of corrugated cardboard as medium and references particular sources from American popular culture of the past forty years. His past work has often abstracted depictions of the internal operations of the body in illness and madness; his sculptures have become more figurative, their sources more immediate and recognizable than before.

Mr. Nanney's drawings of watercolor, pencil, and gouache on paper begin in the mindlessness and liberty of the doodle and coalesce into structures reminiscent of those revealed in cosmology. Mr. Nanney incorporates text and misprisions from song lyrics, overheard conversation and "random thoughts" into these structures. Such a "heap of language" meditates on the states of confusion and clarity, the sources of violence and governance, and the operations of fate and justice. They evoke the microwave background radiation of our universe and the white-noise scrabble of a failing AM radio receiver.

Separating the sounded word from the image, Mr. Nanney's recorded audio pieces consist of samples taken from various sources. In one work Mr. Nanney samples from the band Liquid Liquid, the sitar ragas of Ravi Shankar, dialogue from Stanley Kubrick's 2001 and A Clockwork Orange, field recordings of bedouin music from North Africa, and the ravings of a guitar evangelist. The background sound operates as foil to both the drawings and the three-dimensional sculpture, and underlines the inherent question of form as carrier for meaning.

Following this line of questioning, three of Mr. Nanney's wall-mounted sculptures divorce the written word from the represented. In the typeface of suburban mailboxes, Mr. Nanney has spelled out the words written in blood at the crime scene of the Manson family's Tate ‚LaBianca murders. The vileness and stupidity of these crimes are compared with those perpetrated by the state against individuals; George W. Bush's American Death Machine, as represented by Old Sparky, is faced with the broken English of another prophet of inhuman celebrity. Where mene, mene, tekel, upharsin becomes "Healter Skelter" [sic], the failure of language, of human enterprise, is complete.