closing reception: June 16, 2012 6-9 pm

Press Release

Unapologetically emotional despite her minimalist aesthetic and conceptual methodology, Michelle Jane Lee represents a new wave of artists practicing Emotional Conceptualism. Dedicated to celebrating sensitivity and narrative while embracing a process-based approach towards abstraction, Lee’s work proves conceptualism and emotion need not be mutually exclusive. In the words of Lauren Berlant, professor of English at the University of Chicago, “Foucault was wrong to say that sex was the truth of modernity. It is feeling and affect.” Berlant’s proclamation manifests in the work of Lee and her peers. Michelle Jane Lee’s Love Notes is a series of over 100 coded letters written over three years. Lee constructed a new alphabet by assigning a color to each letter to communicate and navigate a profound personal experience in love and loss – in her own words, “to say everything without saying anything, without being found out.” Painstakingly composing then concealing her language through a secret code, Lee authors communiqués of color. Delightfully chromatic and seemingly purely aesthetic at first glance, each iteration of the series reveals the weight of a highly personal embedded message upon closer inspection. Representing both the desire to communicate devotion and the desperation to cover it up, the work externalizes an internal battle – elevating an emotional crisis through an obsessively systematic practice and sublime formal symbolization. Each letter in the series is composed on hand-gridded paper, first written in English, then finally translated into color. Beginning with Passive Aggressive Love Notes and Other Unmentionable Thoughts, a series of short musings and confessions, evolving through Exit Strategy, a group of larger pieces meant to put an end to the series, Love Notes’ penultimate piece is a 30-foot-long letter entitled I Don’t Want to Stare at Your Feet All Night. Inscribed over one and half years onto a 30-foot-long scroll, the entire letter will be exhibited for the very first time at Gallery 3209. Love Notes comes to a close, perhaps, with Lee’s latest work- I Wish You All the Best. This sub-series advances the linguistic critique by adding another action to the process. The letter is written and translated then painted over in white, only to be scratched into again – I Wish You All the Best forges its own dynamic dialogue of expression and repression. Michelle Jane Lee’s Love Notes are an ecstatic exaltation of color, a powerful deconstruction of language, and a compelling performance of high-risk sincerity.

Curated by: Denni Zelikowsky

http://www.michellejanelee.com/

http://beautifuldecay.com/2012/04/02/michelle-jane-lee-a-labor-of-love/

http://bulkculture.com/interview-michelle-jane-lee/

http://blog.theworkmag.com/post/20531879298/love-notes-opening-saturday-april-7th

http://larecord.com/staff-blog/2012/04/07/michelle-jane-lee-jam-packed-with-emotion

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Gallery 3209 proudly presents the first ever gallery exhibition of the compelling collaboration between legendary photographer Moshe Brakha and his son, emerging artist Eddie Brakha, with their series New Economy.

New Economy is a collision of raw emotional energy from the original punk patriarch and his academic punk son who constructs a conceptual and narrative framework within his fatherʼs visual process. The two perspectives strike a brashbalance, refining one anotherʼs attitudes in their combination.

After three years confined in a lab creating their first series, Silent Pictures, Moshe and Eddie – aka BrakhaX2 – craved human interaction. Silent Pictures explored tools and artifacts representing humans and emotions; New Economy integrates humans into this context in a Constructivist quest to explore the young artistʼs emotional connection to his or her form of expression. Moshe and Eddie ask:

How do you think?

Following the Beuysian proposition that every human is an artist, they approached boxers, musicians, and directors as well as curators and professional artists to participate in New Economy. Moshe and Eddie interviewed each subject a week before their shoot in order to concoct a conceptual conceit through which to present each individualʼs unique connection to their art form the filter through which they experience the world and by which the world experiences them. For 52 weeks – thus 52 subjects – Moshe and Eddie adhered to this strict regimen of interview and photograph, producing two images for each artist. In one close up and one wide, Moshe and Eddie memorialize the essence that their interview reveals.

Moshe and Eddieʼs ever-ingenious technique renders each photograph a
painterly expression of super saturated colors, employing slick lighting and highly designed mise en scene to investigate what makes a human tick. Such acute stylization confronted by the intimacy spawned in the interview reveals a strikingly surreal vision of reality, heightening the viewerʼs awareness of each subjectʼs aura. This is the currency of the New Economy – internationally famed or entirely unknown, each subject in this series is endowed with his or her own supernatural power. However grandiose or nuanced, it is the creative spirit that gives value to humanity and all that We produce. New Economy is on view at GALLERY3209 from January 7th- Febuary 11th 2012.

http://www.brakhax2.com

November 12 – December 17, 2011

Eduardo Consuegra, Michael Decker, Rachel Foullon, Jason Hwang, Peter Wu.

Eduardo Consuegra

Untited, 2011; Framed magazine pages, graph paper; 24.5 x 24.5 inches framed

Courtesy of the Artist and Richard Telles Fine Art

In Greene Park Gallery’s first exhibition, Charnel House Scraps, we looked at the theoretical distance between an object’s genesis and its new meaning and influence in both the foreseeable and unforeseeable future. The following exhibition, The Unfinished, focused on the artistic transition from the source material to the artist’s creation of the newly-possible. Because the works still begged an action to bring about completion, the new extent of what was possible in the work was yet undefined, extending the new possibilities into the viewer’s hands. Looking through the lens of the previous exhibitions, Raw Materials draws a course back to the inception of the artist’s decision to alter or capitalize the original object or sign.

Eduardo Consuegra’s two artworks in Raw Materials bookend the range of work in this exhibition. Beginning with meticulously-chosen magazine advertisements that create new interplays from the artist’s earliest memories, ads from vintage Colombian magazines for American products are carefully joined in collage to invent a déjà vu. Consuegra’s other work is the symbolic counterpoint, pairing mass-produced paper stock with precisely color-matched, mass-produced domestic paint to create works that explore painting as a mechanical procedure combining two matching materials.

Michael Decker demonstrates how a specific material can offer innumerable permutations of signs. In Untitled (muffin tops), 2011, Decker amasses a collection of just under a dozen found wooden cutting boards in various novelty shapes. Then, in this the first of several unique installations of the cutting boards, he begins exploring the potential of this group by responding to the architecture and conditions in which they are shown. Still giving the appearance of ready-mades, the boards’ found condition has been preserved under coats of polyurethane, leaving the work’s raw state seemingly one step removed from their castoff status. Decker’s interest in the mailability of material is expressed by treating the boards as a repeated mantra, whereby the meaning changes as the individual parts are explored for both their formal and narrative potential with the group.

Hearkening to the architectural themes that have informed her work, Rachel Foullon’s Knot Drawing (Manger), 2011, and Rural Action (Wringing), 2010, wall-mounted sculptures made of wood and canvas, bestow industrial qualities to domestic materials. Their inherent softness and delicacy is frozen away by their tense arrangement: wood girding canvas caught in an act of labor and industry. There is no overt attempt made at obscuring the fact that these are two very basic substances mingling together, but Foullon’s fixed twists and folds transform the expectations of the materials presented.

Jason Hwang’s photographs construct a bridge between the literal and the figurative exploration of raw materials as artworks. In his triptych Speed (1994), 2010, Hwang’s repeated images of a laserdisc of the film Speed mimic a work in a recent group exhibition at JB Jurve that featured the vibrating frames of the film paused in the middle of a climactic scene. When compared with his Negative Reconstruction, Visual Models series, the objects in both series assume greater formal possibilities as Hwang creates moments in light as material that exist in his dimension-defying staging.

Acting as the milepost between this and the first exhibition, Peter Wu presents new works from his Zzyzx Rd. series of sculptures. In the early works in the series, where he utilizes an excess of sense, Wu obscured the meanings of the objects he selected. Still searching to create new meanings and possibilities through the curated curios, Wu explores the interplay between objects that arises when his decisions in juxtapositions and alterations are minimized in order to capitalize on the original source object. Whether the artifacts of that past are authentic or Wu’s subtle fiction, greater possibilities can play out between the histories of the objects on display.

http://www.greeneparkgallery.com/rawmaterials.php