Address

Curated by Female Background

Opening Reception: Thursday, Aug 10, 6-8pm,  Exhibition: Aug 11- Oct 1, 2017

Perimeter Gallery, 96 Main Street, Belfast, ME

Tu-Sa: 7:00 am to 5:00 pm, Su: 8:00 am – 2:00 pm

Jonathan Peck

Perimeter Gallery is pleased to present Address, a group exhibition curated by Female Background and featuring artists Maura Brewer, Carly Glovinski, Rachel Kennedy and Shane Smith, Selena Kimball, Christine Negus, Jonathan Peck, Protest Banner Lending Library, Steve Reinke, and Courtney Tramposh. The exhibition will run through September 20th, with an opening reception on August 10 from 6pm-8pm.

The works in Address use writing, frequently emphasizing direct communication alongside graphic strategies. Such an emphasis mixes the social modes of signage and conversation with the personal and particular information found in gesture, material, and image.

Short, declarative statements and the immediacy of imagery purport easy access to content and communicable information. The exhibited works complicate and enhance the simple content that text or image alone often seem to contain.

Christine Negus

Courtney Tramposh

Christine Negus

Maura Brewer is a visual artist who works in video, performance and experimental garment design. Her projects examine the ways that consumer culture, including mass media and fashion, constructs female subjects. She is a founding member of the Rational Dress Society, a counter-fashion collective.

Maura Brewer was a Whitney Independent Study Program fellow from 2014-2015, and received her MFA from the University of California, Irvine in 2011. Recent shows include MUMOK in Vienna, Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève and Samuel Freeman Gallery in Los Angeles. She is a 2017 California Community Foundation Fellow, and a 2016 Creative Economic Development Fund Grantee. Her work has been written about in The Guardian, New York Magazine, The Huffington Post and Surface Magazine. She lives and works in Los Angeles.

Carly Glovinski investigates patterns, objects and organizing systems found in everyday life. She received her BFA from Boston University in 2003. She is represented by Morgan Lehman Gallery in New York. Her work has been included in exhibitions at deCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, The Center for Maine Contemporary Art (CMCA), Jacksonville Museum of Contemporary Art, Boston Center for the Arts, Portland Museum of Art and the Visual Arts Center of New Jersey. Recent solo exhibitions include “Scout Land” at Carroll and Sons, Boston, and “LAND-LINE” at 3SArtSpace in Portsmouth, NH. She has been awarded grants from the New Hampshire Charitable Foundation and the Berkshire Taconic Foundation, and has recently completed residencies at the Studios at MASS MoCA, and the Teton ArtLab in Jackson, WY. She currently lives and works in New Hampshire.

Rachel Kennedy is a PhD neuroscientist and published poet. She has shown her photographic-based poetry at the Robert E. White Gallery at Husson University, and has participated with her husband Shane C. Smith in performance venues and sculptural projects, including a cement body sculpture at UNC. She currently teaches for Bard College and Columbia University.

Selena Kimball is a visual artist based in Brooklyn, New York. Working primarily in large-scale collage, she uses printed documentary evidence, physically re-working visual histories into constructed surfaces and installations. This process of taking apart and putting back together is a search for what is hidden in both the content and the appearance of these printed histories. She has exhibited at Feature, Inc., Entropia Gallery, The Estonian National Museum, Portland Museum of Art, Katonah Museum, The Center for Contemporary Art, Warsaw, and the Museum of the Romanian Peasant, Bucharest. She was awarded residency fellowships at the MacDowell colony and the Millay Colony, and most recently received the Pollock-Krasner grant. Her work has been reviewed in The Boston Globe, The Frankfurter Zeitung, and The New York Observer.

Selena Kimball earned her BFA in sculpture from The Rhode Island School of Design and her MFA in combined media from Hunter College. She has collaborated for over a decade with visual anthropologist Alyssa Grossman on films that have been shown at documentary film festivals internationally. Her published work can be seen in the collage novel “The Dreaming Life of Leonora de la Cruz”, which was produced together with art historian Agnieszka Taborska (Gdansk 2004, slowo/obraz teryrtoria; New York 2007, Midmarch Arts Press; Paris 2007, Édition Interférences).  Their most recent book “The Unfinished Life of Phoebe Hicks” was published by slowo/obraz teryrtoria in 2013. She is Assistant Professor in the School of Art, Media + Technology at Parsons, the New School for Design.

Christine Negus is a multidisciplinary artist and writer employing humour and irony to investigate nostalgia and loss. Her works range from ephemeral objects, including glittery party banners, neon signs and artificially-flowered memorial wreaths, to single-channel animations and videos that are all steeped in an amusingly sweet sadness.

Christine received the National Film Board of Canada’s Best Emerging Canadian Video/Filmmaker award through the Images Festival in 2008 and she won one of two jury prizes at the Milwaukee Underground Film Festival in 2012. Her creative writing has been included in the in the anthology Blast/Counterblast, edited by Anthony Elms and Steve Reinke. Additionally, her works have been reviewed in The Globe and Mail and Modern Painters.

Christine received her MFA in 2010 from Northwestern University in Chicago, Illinois and her BFA from Western University in London, Ontario in 2008. Some of her notable exhibitions and screenings include: Dalhousie Art Gallery, Montreal Underground Film Festival, Cambridge Galleries, Art Gallery of York University, Xpace Cultural Centre, Artists’ Television Access in San Francisco, California and Microscope Gallery in Brooklyn, New York. She has had solo exhibitions at Gallery TPW, gallerywest and Julius Caesar in Chicago, Illinois.

Jonathan Peck’s work has been exhibited at Mrs Barbers, Los Angeles; the New Museum, New York; Deitch Projects; New York; VersaceVersaceVersace, Miami; and Thessaloniki Museum of Photography. Peck was awarded The South Florida Cultural Consortium Fellowship for Visual and Media Arts and was an artist in residence at the Cooper Union School of Art. Peck has a BFA from Kansas City Art Institute, an MFA from Yale University, and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. He lives and works in New York.

The Protest Banner Lending Library (Aram Han Sifuentes in collaboration with Verónica Casado Hernández, Ishita Dharap, and Tabitha Anne Kunkes) is a space for people to gain skills to learn to make their own banners, a communal sewing space where we support each other’s voices, and a place where people can check out handmade banners to use in protests. The words and these banners have a growing history. They are made by someone, used in a protest, returned to the library, and then taken by someone else to a different protest. The banners carry the histories of the hands that made and hold them, and the places they have and will travel.

Steve Reinke is an artist and writer best known for his video essays. He lives in Chicago and teaches in the department of Art, Theory, Practice at Northwestern. Myrectumisnotagrave.com

Shane C. Smith is a NYC-based artist; his venues circle between unsanctioned performance spaces and curated museum exhibitions. Exhibitions and performance venues have included the Institute of Contemporary Art, Maine College of Art, Portland, ME; The Carrack Modern, Durham, NC; The Ackland Museum, UNC; DAC Gallery, Los Angeles; and the American Museum of Natural History, NYC.

Courtney Tramposh has exhibited at The Proposition, New York; Vaudeville Park, New York; Red Box Studio, Beijing; Apexart, New York; Debs & Co Gallery, New York; Clementine Gallery, New York; and Paragraph Gallery, Lawrence KA. Tramposh has a BFA from Kansas City Art Institute where she was awarded the Nelson and Hollander scholarships, and an MFA from Hunter College, NY where she received the William H. Graf Travel Grant. Tramposh also attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture on a full scholarship. She lives and works in New York.

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Female Background consists of Gabriella D’Italia and Cameron Crawford. Their collaborative work has been exhibited at TEMP, New York; Doyers, New York; and Perimeter Gallery, Belfast, Knockdown Center, New York. Publications of text/image works include Mary Magazine, Bell School Press; Touch, See, Taste vol. 1 (anthology), Temporary Agency; and Maine Arts Journal Quarterly, UMVA. Readings include Interstate Projects, New York & Knockdown Center, New York.

Tonight! Thursday May 25th

Come through tomorrow night, Thursday at 7pm for a reading and conversation with Formal Complaint artists, Female Background, Aria Dean (via Skype), Christopher Hanrahan, and Mario Navarro, moderated by co-curator Dana Kopel. Video by Mehmet Salih Yildirim. : : : : #formalcomplaint #artisttalk @danaak #danakopel @rachaelrakes#rachaelrakes #CarlEHazlewood #hannetierney #artinmaspeth @lol_prosciutto #ariadean @mariomarionavarro #marionavarro #femalebackground @christopherhanrahan #christopherhanrahan @meganejp #meganpahmier

A post shared by Knockdown Center (@knockdowncenter) on May 24, 2017 at 9:44am PDT

Formal Complaint: Artists in Conversation
Thursday, May 25, 2017
7:00pm

Join artists Female Background, Aria Dean (via Skype), Christopher Hanrahan, and Mario Navarro in a reading and conversation with Formal Complaint co–curator Dana Kopel. For this event each artist will read a brief passage (from a text of their own, or one that they admire) that connects to their work and ideas. Following the reading, Kopel will moderate a discussion on the exhibition’s themes of sad formalism, tender objects, and domestic and vernacular architecture.

Knockdown Center

Craft, scrap, and architectural minimalism coincide in Formal Complaint. Featuring work by Aria Dean, Female Background, Christopher Hanrahan, Mario Navarro, and Megan Pahmier, the exhibition returns handiwork to formalism, while maintaining a sense of slackness.

Metal armatures lean and bend precariously; a painting on unstretched canvas drags on the floor. Discarded materials and everyday objects come to conjure an upright but “bereft formalism,” as Hanrahan calls it. His sculptural outline of a table rendered in thin strips of brass deploys a graceful material precarity to reclaim architectural space. An untitled sculpture by Dean disrupts the gallery space, with pipes that lean precariously against the wall and stretch across the floor; and her floor-grazing painting Untitled, from the Glob Cobbler (2016), is marked with streaks of black, white, and ochre, seemingly part artwork and part dropcloth.

Tenderness and despair coalesce in objects that can only just support themselves, much less make a claim for historical or philosophical significance. Some works can barely sustain their original forms: the grapes speared on a steel rod in Pahmier’s Fountain (2015), for instance, shrivel and rot over the course of the exhibition. The vaguely figurative object sculptures of Female Background act as neither reference nor obfuscation, like signals of intended failure. Mario Navarro’s mobiles repurpose materials from local demolitions—rebar, bits of stone, and cement. Hanging from the ceiling, they combine the flat pictorial space of a painting with the haphazard juxtapositions of found sculpture, combining elements of destruction and decor.

The works in the exhibition undermine past minimalisms from multiple directions—in terms of material, attitude, and dependence on context—but out of a care for and maintenance of form, rather than a casting off of it. Through these mergers of vernacular minimalism and sad design, work and supporting structure, Formal Complaint creates its own ecology of exhibitionary space.