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:

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:



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

AMY JEAN PORTER
NORTH AMERICAN MAMMALS SPEAK THE TRUTH AND OFTEN FLATTER YOU UNNECESSARILY
SEPTEMBER 12TH - OCTOBER 18TH, 2003

Debs & Co. is pleased to present North American Mammals Speak the Truth and Often Flatter You Unnecessarily, a series of 319 gouache and ink drawings by Amy Jean Porter. This will be Ms. Porter's solo exhibition debut.

In North American Mammals... Porter takes on natural history illustration and the varieties and vagaries of taxonomy, language, and its cultural artifacts. From John James Audubon to the Golden Nature Guides, the taxonomic abstractions that are differing genera, species, and varieties are precisely and lovingly described, while any representation of the individual is submerged within description of the type. Porter has worked from several generations of images with all their slight mutations of form, and engaged a startling color palette, to re-describe the individual out of the typical.

North American Brush Mouse takes its pose from a number of illustrations of this mammal made in the past hundred years, but the usual Latinate specifications concerning the subject have been replaced by what the animal in question would like to express. Brush Mouse itself says, "If you have talent, you don't need the boobs," a profound statement whose truth is absolutely guaranteed by the title of the series. While they may lay it on thick, these individual animals never lie.

The purported veracity of the statements underlines the flaw of taxonomy, and the foolishness of the superposition of human systems on the world. Replacing the binomial nomenclature of the Linnaean system (what's in a name?), Porter's mammals' pronouncements retain the ring of truth simply because they are privileged words on the face of a drawing. Distracted by the incongruous humor, the fact that animals do not (in general) speak a human language occurs to the viewer long after reading the animals' statements. Though Porter has replaced the scientific Greek, Latin, and numbers of species specifications with the cozier English, these particular words are merely a repetition of sound bites shot down from the wilderness of popular culture; sources include Seventeen, Psychology Today, New York Times, Men's Journal, Glamour, Martha Stewart Living, Time Out New York, and, of course, Smithsonian.

Ms. Porter has shown recently at Sandroni Rey Gallery in Los Angeles and the Monsterrat College of Art. She will be included in BirdSpace: A Post Audubon Artists Aviary, a touring exhibition originating at the New Orleans Contemporary Arts Center in 2004. Her work has been reproduced in Cabinet, Circa, and Columbia magazines.

PROJECT ROOM: GARY PONZO

Gary Ponzo's untitled sculpture references fin-de-siecle ballrooms, planktonic life forms, Albertian perspective, and arte povera, for starters, all experienced through the clarity of obsessive compulsive disorder and other neuro-transmitter-related "issues." Made of tens of thousands of interlocked paper clips, metal hoops, and a lightbulb, Ponzo's chandelier of pathology is at once goofy as all get out and as elegant as algebra. This is Gary Ponzo's first exhibition outside of Canada; he has exhibited previously in Stratford and Toronto, Ontario.