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| Emma Amos, Godzilla, 1966, oil on canvas, 50 x 56 inches. Image via ryanleegallery.com |
I lost an
arm on my last trip home: Derrick Adams, Emma Amos, Bethany Collins, Sara
Rahbar
January 15 – February 21, 2015
Opening reception: Thursday, January 15, 2015, 6
– 8PM
515 West
26th Street
New York,
NY
From
ryanleegallery.com:
Ryan Lee
is pleased to announce I lost an
arm on my last trip
home, a group exhibition of work by Derrick Adams, Emma Amos, Bethany Collins, and Sara Rahbar that examines the ambagious
nature of language, memory, bloodline, and tradition. Each artist, through
painting, sculpture, and work on paper, applies individual systems to confront
past, present, and future histories. The exhibition borrows its title from the
opening line of Kindred, a novel by
celebrated science-fiction author Octavia Butler. Spoken by the protagonist, it
suggests the twisting qualities of history, time, and space that can be both repairing
and damaging.
Informing abstract
ideas of the human condition as it reflects notions surrounding history and
landscape, Derrick Adams (b. 1970, Baltimore, US) and Sara Rahbar (b. 1976,
Tehran, IR) have disparate approaches to similar themes of otherness,
post-colonial aesthetics, and labor. Adams uses his signature architectural and
“planning” language to confront social convention in large, narrative mixed-media
collages on view from the Deconstruction
Worker series (2011-present). His
work moves unexpectedly, although fluidly, weaving together elements of
politics, social codes, futurism, and architecture. Rahbar works primarily with
bronze, found objects, textiles and war materials to examine modes of labor,
tension, and aggression that exist across time, structured space, and country. Her
Flag series (2003-2013),
tapestry-like in how they hang vertically off the wall, combine military
fabrics and emblems, Middle Eastern textiles, embroidery, and found US flags. They
debut alongside work from her most recent series, 206 Bones (2013-present),
which are assembled from found worker tools and weaponry and have a heftier
physicality. Both artists travel a distinct landscape, with oscillating
dualities of native and unfamiliar, tension and calm, threat and provocation,
to explicate contemporary behavior.
Conceptually,
Emma Amos (b. 1938, Atlanta,US) and Bethany Collins (b. 1984, Montgomery, US)
activate devices to resist and alter established visual codes and systems of
meaning. Collins engages outdated text or encountered language, particularly
racialized, to confront narratives and history, usually by employing a set of
rules to weaken, erase, or quiet it. Requiring a specific physicality – working
until her fingers throb, using spit to facilitate the erasures, or leaving
charcoaled fingerprints on delicate pages of The Southern Review, 1988 (2014) – the work explores the unnerving possibility of
multiple meanings and dual perceptions. While Collins is interested in
unpacking language by examining its evolutions and limitations, Amos looks to
engage and dislodge notions of social and political constructs in her
provocative and deeply referential compositions. The oil paintings from the
1960s, including Godzilla (1966) on
view, present unlikely subjects in a traditional manner. The series of
monoprints from the early 1990s take on the American flag, incorporating found,
bequeathed, and staged photographs to investigate narrative, history, and myths
surrounding her memories of the South. Amos confronts ideas of otherness and
privilege within an art historical canon as commentary on a larger
investigation into America’s history. Both artists create works wrought with
cultural, historical, individual, and collective memory.
Together the
artists in I lost an arm on my last trip
home have exhibited widely in important solo and group shows, including at
Art in General, MOMA, PS1, Museum of Modern Art, Performa Biennial, The Studio
Museum in Harlem, New York; Bass Museum of Art, Miami; Centre Pompidou, Museé
National d’Art Moderne, Paris; Changwon Sculpture Biennale, Gyeongnam;
Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis; Fowler Museum at UCLA, Los Angeles;
Goethe-Institute, New Delhi; High Museum of Art, Atlanta; National Centre of
Contemporary Art, Moscow; Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane; and Sharjah
Biennial, UAE.
