EVENTS- RECENT Exhibitions

 

Textiles and language evolved together. The first knot replicated the gesture of an embrace. That embrace, repeated, helped sustain life. We conveyed messages, written and woven, as our cultures developed, spread and connected with others beyond our visual scope. Textual presents four artists who spin contemporary tales of diversity, technology, codes, structures and the multiple layers of meaning packed within the spatial field.

Exhibit Dates: April 24- May 31, 2015

 

 

Leonardo Benzant

Leonardo Benzant is a Queens-based artist who investigates ideographic writing, charms, objects of power, memory, codes of culture, cosmology, and the effects of colonialism on those who have been enslaved. Through a slow, repetitive, yet varied practice, Benzant’s sculptural works express concepts of time, space, spirituality, ancestors, polyrhythm, ritual and inquires into notions of ancient technology.

The trajectory of the artist’s development also involves an unconventional combination of both independent research and mentorships in both cultural activities and multidisciplinary artistic practices.

Recent and upcoming exhibitions include “In Between Days” at Driscoll Babcock Galleries in New York City, “Venturing Out of The Heart of Darkness” at The Harvey B. Gantt Center for African-American Arts+Culture in Charlotte, NC, “Textual” at ODETTA gallery in Bushwick, Brooklyn, and “Koi No Yokan III” at 101/Exhibit in Los Angeles, CA. Benzant's works are represented in various prominent, private collections. Benzant studied fine art at the Pratt Institute.

---

 

Annette Cords

Combining a variety of media, from painting to weaving and installation, Annette Cords transforms materials and merges ideas. In her hand-woven Jacquard tapestries, Cords examines the twin practices of making and interpreting marks, of encoding and decoding. Drawing on a variety of sources, from the urban vernacular of graffiti to scientific recordings of decaying particles, she presents our attempts to make sense of the world through visual structures.

Recent solo exhibitions include Sideways, New York Public Library, New York; Diamond Days, Villa Rosenthal, Jena, Germany; Turnarounds, AxD Gallery, Philadelphia; and Cross- Coupling, Posie Kviat Gallery, Hudson, NY. Her work has appeared in group exhibtions at numerous venues, including MASS MoCA, Westbeth Gallery, LG Tripp Gallery, Jenaer Kunstverein, Montreal Centre for Contemporary Textiles, Michael Steinberg Fine Art and ODETTA. She has received a Change Inc, Robert Rauschenberg Fellowship and a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, and is currently participating in Open Sessions at the Drawing Center in New York.

---

 

Elana Herzog

Elana Herzog is interested in the dematerialization of an object, she seeks to eliminate any hierarchy that may exists between surface and structure, challenging its structural autonomy, and making it a contingency to its surroundings. She enjoys the alchemy in the commingling of unlikely things, and the deeply evocative power of stuff.

Herzog has recently mounted a major installation, Valence, at The Boiler (Pierogi), in Brooklyn. To A Logical Conclusion, 2011, which will beshown at Odetta, foreshadows Valence in many ways. Herzog's solo exhibitions include Lmak Projects in New York City; the Daum Museum of Contemporary Art in Missouri; the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art in Connecticut; Smack Mellon in New York. She has an upcoming solo exhibition this fall at Studio 10 in Bushwick. Her work has been widely exhibited internationally as well as numerous group shows at institutions such as the Tang Museum, the Weatherspoon Museum, The Brooklyn Museum and The Museum of Arts and Design.  In 2014, Herzog was awarded a residency at the Josef and Annie Albers Foundation, and in 2013 by Gertrude Contemporary in Melbourne, Australia. She has received numerous other awards including the Anonymous Was A Woman Award in 2009, the Louis Comfort Tiffany Award in 2007, and the NYFA Individual Artist’s Fellowship in 2007 and 1999. She was a 2008-2009 Workspace Resident of the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and Dieu Donne Paper. She is currently a lecturer at Yale University.

 

---

 

Ken Weathersby

Ken Weathersby chooses to complicate what might be considered the usual order of the structural elements in paintings. By foregrounding what is normally the support, and by interrupting or countering the aggressive priority of the painted, retinal area (what is “made to be seen”), he opens up spaces within. His undoing of conventional relations of support to supported puts wood, linen, canvas, paint and optical effect on potentially equal footing, as elements in a lexicon to be reshuffled. Collage elements are then introduced into this abstract situation often from reproductions cut from art history books. The figures are both within the painting and outside of the presumed abstract visual event. They mimic, echo and extend the artist’s and viewer’s acts of looking within a spatial field of abstraction.

Ken Weathersby’s paintings are on exhibit in 2015 in “Textual” at ODETTA Gallery, in a three-person show at 57w57 Arts, and in a two-person show (along with Li Trincere) at Key Projects, all in New York.  His work is traveling in “Therely Bare (Redux),” a group show opening in Leiden, the Netherlands, at I.S. Projects in spring 2015.  Weathersby’s works were seen in 2014 at Parallel Art Space, Pierogi Gallery, and the Aljira Fellows exhibition at Aljira Art Center.  Recent solo shows include at Pierogi Gallery in Brooklyn (2012), “One River Gallery in Englewood, NJ (2013), and at NIAD Art Center Gallery in Richmond, CA (2013).  His paintings were also included in “Post-Op” at Mixed Greens Gallery in New York (2012) and the National Academy of Art Museum’s 183rd Annual: An Invitational Exhibition of Contemporary American Art in New York.  Weathersby received an MFA in Painting from Cranbrook Academy of Art and has lived in or near New York City since 1990.