Scott Treleaven
Rachel Eulena Williams

FAIR
May 20 – June 21, 2020
thisisfair.org

COOPER COLE is pleased to partisipate in FAIR, May 18 – June 12, 2020, presenting works by Scott Treleaven and Rachel Eulena Williams.

FAIR is a new art fair initiative organized by The New Art Dealers Alliance (NADA) and designed to be online, function cooperatively, and act as a benefit for its community of galleries and artists.

FAIR offers an alternative profit-sharing model, structured to facilitate mutual support within our industry, and provide revenue to each of its participants during a time in which galleries have temporarily closed their physical locations. A percentage from each sale made from FAIR will be merged into collective pools for both participating galleries and artists, to then be evenly distributed among each group.

Each participating gallery is invited to present up to four art works over the four-week duration of the event, with a “rehang” with a new artwork each week.

Week 1: Rachel Eulena Williams
May 20, 2020, Live at 10am EST

Week 2: Scott Treleaven
May 27, 2020, Live at 10am EST

Week 3: Rachel Eulena Williams
June 3, 2020, Live at 10am EST

Week 4: Scott Treleaven
June 10, 2020, Live at 10am EST

There are more than four
Andy Fabo
Robert Flack
Tim Jocelyn
Chrysanne Stathacos
Curated by Jacob Korczynski
April 11 - June 21, 2020

To view the exhibition online click here

For me, life in this city begins and ends with artist-initiated networks, where energies and programmes are constantly opening and ending, keeping pace with the rate at which artist’s studios are closed and relocated. These networks establish where work is developed, shown, or both, and they affirm what is missing as much as what is made. The affective affinities that enable these associations also produced this exhibition. More specifically, it is anchored upon the long-term friendship and dialogue between Andy Fabo and Chrysanne Stathacos, and expanded to incorporate the work of two artists who are no longer with us due to the ongoing epidemic of AIDS: Andy's lover Tim Jocelyn (1952-1986) and Chrysanne's close friend Robert Flack (1957-1993). The result is a kind of doubled portrait, like catching your own gaze on a reflective surface in close proximity to another.

From the earliest stage of his interdisciplinary practice, Andy Fabo has asserted his queer subjectivity in his work. The Wild Ones (1975) performs as a painting, yet acts as an assemblage with acrylic, velvet, leather and metal studs framing the troika collaged at its centre. Made in the aftermath of his partner Tim’s death when Andy was facing an impasse with painting, Sisyphus on the Plains (1988) features the eponymous mythological figure exposed naked upon a landscape, turning upwards to face their burden. Silverado (2001), is a series produced with ink on silver card, and here the medium leads the image. Pooled or bubbled ink comes together to form moments of fluidity, at times contained, and at others nearly sliding off the surface. In his practice, Tim Jocelyn developed a body of work for which textiles were the primary material. In doing so, his work was not so much medium-specific as it was subject specific: textiles always suggest bodies, either present or absent. He produced tapestries and garments alike and both are represented here through one of the many folding screens he produced in the early 1980s as well as two clothing pieces. The geometrical abstraction present on the three panels of the former foregrounds adored art historical references that Tim pointed to throughout his practice. With his Skyline jacket and Gordon’s shirt, two opposite milieus of artistic production are contrasted: a rising cityscape made manifest in the hot, bright colours of neon lights, and pastoral elements of nature rendered in earth tone hues.

Throughout her practice, Chrysanne has expanded the medium of painting via printing. Take for example her Broken Glass series, in which the cracked remnants of a pane are transferred to the soft surface of canvas or linen, forming a new object. Her experimentation with printing on different surfaces with various objects is further demonstrated by 1-900-Mirror-Mirror (1993). An interactive installation that can be physically entered by the individual viewer, this work invited viewers to ask a question about the future, as a way to look ahead at the height of the AIDS crisis. Through her groundbreaking use of early video communication technology, Chrysanne’s engagement with the future also anticipated the current moment we find ourselves in, when we look towards the reflective surfaces of our screens not only to see one another, but also ourselves.

Where Chrysanne considered the way the bodies of the viewers were reflected onto the surrounding surfaces, in his photographic works presented here Robert Flack took the body itself as a site of projection. All three were produced after he was diagnosed with AIDS and are inextricable from the psychic and physical transition he was undertaking at that time. With his series Love Mind (1992), he photographed multiple subjects as saturated coloured light was cast upon their chakra centres. Produced prior to the advent of digital photography, the two selections from this expansive series requires the viewer to look, and then look again, expanding an image of the body outside of the corporeal. In his earlier work Etheric Double (1990), a male nude is rendered in negative, suggesting a spectre. With both the body and the background pulsing with radiant auras, the inversion of the image suspends the figure between legibility and ephemerality, between the radiance of life and the threat of death. Faced with fragility, Robert and Tim posed a question, one that Andy and Chrysanne continue to ask: where do we locate the body and what lies beyond?

– Jacob Korczynski

Toronto
March 12, 2020

A View Without A Room
Michelle Grabner
Vanessa Maltese
March 13 - TBD, 2020

MICKEY
1635 W Grand Ave
Chicago, IL
60622
USA

To view the exhibition online click here

COOPER COLE is pleased to collaborate with Chicago based gallery MICKEY to present a two person exhibition, A View Without A Room, featuring the work of Michelle Grabner and Vanessa Maltese, curated by Simon Cole.

Michelle Grabner’s sculptural work employs familiar objects, arrangements, and patterns to explore the power structures that underpin everyday life. Investigating the political resonance of the concept of ‘order’ that traverses the boundaries of governance and visual culture, the artist asserts that even the most domestic patterns on textiles reverberate with political connotations. In Grabner’s plaster reliefs, crocheted compositions are embedded in, and removed from, plaster molds set in baking pans, revealing that color has leached from the from the textile into the plaster, and speaking to the ways that our environments condition us. Her wood reliefs that display screen printed lids and abstract gingham paintings invert the previously mentioned material strategy by means of building layers, drawing attention to the visual ordering that exists in domestic environments. The works in this exhibition exemplify Grabner’s interest in undermining the social power of ordinary objects and images; Instead of developing new forms and patterns, she intentionally extracts common and mundane motifs, recontextualizing them in sculptural work that makes their social functions hyper-visible.

Vanessa Maltese’s new paintings and sculptures explore processes of pattern recognition and viewer perception. In her paintings Hypothesizing coincidence no.1-no.8 Maltese employs klecksography, a process of making images from inkblots. The artist begins by making blot prints on drawing pads, groups them together according to similarities and relationships between shapes, and from there transfers the drawings onto the panel surfaces. Maltese’s process of making these works speaks to associative thinking, recalling the historical use of klecksography in psychoanalysis as a way of tapping into the subconscious. In her sculptural series Hook, Maltese continues her inquiry into human perception by creating cast bronze works that depict coat hooks broken in various ways, with the intention of resembling faces. Emerging from Maltese’s research on pareidolia, the psychological phenomenon in which recognizable patterns are identified in unrelated contexts, the title of these works refers both to the literal objects as well as the sensation of a pareidolic instance.

A View Without A Room places Grabner and Maltese’s work into an incisive dialogue around objects and visuality. Both artists are influenced by imagery that is workaday and easily overlooked, but is also laden with social, political, and psychological implications. Together, Grabner and Maltese’s respective practices use familiar visual patterns to reveal the structures that condition the way we see.

COOPER COLE
1134 Dupont St.
Toronto, Ontario M6H2A2
Canada

info@coopercolegallery.com
+1.416.531.8000

coopercolegallery.com

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