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March
4th - 7th,
2010
Opening preview: Thursday March 4th, 2010
dm contemporary is pleased to announce its participation at PULSE Contemporary Art Fair - NYC, taking place this coming week from March 4th through 7th, 2010. This year PULSE is being held at a new venue located at 330 West Street and West Houston in a former New York Central Railroad freight train terminal – the space with its unusual architectural features is a unique environment in which to exhibit and view contemporary art. dm contemporary’s exhibit at PULSE will focus on the works of three of its artists who continually push and expand the boundaries of their respective media: Linda Cummings, Frances Richardson, and Tomomi Ono.
Linda Cummings’ seven photographs in this exhibition are from her recent series, “Stirring the Waters”. A departure from her previous fast-paced, urban-centric photographic scrolls, these images are meditative waterscapes that invite you to slow down, take your time, stay and ponder. Cummings’ process, rooted in her performance-based ‘slip’ photographs during the 90’s, takes her down the river in a kayak, using a paddle to navigate, stroke, and stir the surface of the water and a camera to frame, capture, and preserve that moment. In the artist’s words: “The gestures I make with my paddle and body both gather, and disperse, the shapes and colors reflected by sunlight. Everything is in motion until the camera extracts a moment, an image – plucked out of time, out of place.” Moreover, In her double images she puts into play the optical phenomenon of binary rivalry. Her proposition is that, “the camera records a one point perspective, while our eyes record two”, so by pairing two images side by side in each photograph she offers an exploration of that optical experience. Cummings lives and works in New York City. Her work has been widely exhibited nationally and internationally, and it is in private as well as public collections, such as: The National Museum of American Art, Washington, DC; The Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY; Museo Nazionale della Fotographia de Brescia, Brescia, Italy; Musee Jenisch, Vevey, Switzerland.
Frances Richardson ponders the notion of gambling and risk in “The Transcendent Wager”, a drawing in four parts depicting the four suits in a deck of cards. Since 1997 Richardson has used the plus (+) and minus (-) signs to form her drawings using pencils of varying density and applying alternating pressure on the paper to attain the subtle gradation between light and dark. It is with that same simple ‘vocabulary’ that ideas of loss and gain, probability and infinity, doubt and belief, advantage and disadvantage are expressed in these meticulously constructed drawings. In a 2007 review of Richardson’s work in the LA Times, Leah Ollman wrote: “The proposition seems absurd, really: to be able to express an infinite array of information and emotion through the finite tools of binary code – switching between on/off, zero/one, plus/minus. And yet all communication in this digital era boils down to those fundamental building blocks…(Richardson) demonstrates just how expansive those reductive tools can be.” In her own words, Richardson adds: “The chance of drawing all the aces in a hand of poker is in itself a beautiful thing. Chance is beautiful. I wanted to appreciate that moment as one of beauty which has its own reward.” This moment of beauty in the midst of instability and transience is precisely what Richardson’s other drawing in this exhibition reveals. “Almost at an Instant” (detail above center), is a twelve part drawing, which captures the point in time when a bubble bursts - that calamitous split second. Here Richardson reconstructs an idea of what the eye cannot perceive and, in plus (+) and minus (-) signs, proposes that beauty can be found in the extension of this fragment of time. Frances Richardson, who lives and works in London, U.K., studied at the Royal College of Art. She has been exhibited nationally and internationally, and her work is in private as well as public collections, namely: The Victoria and Albert Museum, London, U.K.; and The Museum of Fine Art, Houston, Texas. Richardson’s drawings are featured in “Vitamin D”, a major comprehensive international survey on drawing today.
Tomomi Ono’s underlying theme that runs consistently throughout her work is that of human existence, and existence in general. In her earlier lithographs, the ‘seed’ series, imaginary seeds as symbols of life, gather in clusters or scatter in the wind – existing delicately at the mercy of natural elements. Their apparent fragility is masterfully revealed through Ono’s exquisite execution and careful detail. In her most recent ‘sky’ series, Ono contemplates the existence of the stars in the sky. According to her, “the stars in the sky are not visible in the daylight but they exist all the time.” Depicting the night sky in rich black and white in “Milky Way”, a monotype lithograph in six panels, Ono focuses on the immensity of the universe in which those seemingly minuscule stars exist – implying our even more miniscule existence, and reflecting on the mystery of that existence. Tomomi Ono was born in Osaka, Japan, where she studied traditional Japanese painting. She now lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Ono’s work has been exhibited in the US and abroad, and it is in major collections in New York, including The New York Public Library, as well as others in Tokyo, Italy, Spain and Poland.
PULSE is located at: 330 West Street and West Houston in New York City. Directions can be found on the PULSE website http://www.pulse-art.com
Show hours are: March 4th -6th, 12 pm – 8 pm, and March 7th, 12 pm – 5 pm.
PULSE New York private preview brunch takes place on Thursday, March 4th, 9 am – 12 pm (VIP passes only).
dm contemporary, Box 263, Mill Neck, New York 11765. TEL: 516 922 3552 www.dmcontemporary.com. Contact person: Doris Mukabaa
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