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William Pope.L, Orange People Are The Grid On The Ceiling,
2012, Mixed media on paper 12 x 9 inches. Image via
miandn.com.
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COLORED
WAITING ROOM
September 12 – October 26, 2013
534 West
26th Street
New York,
NY
From the
Mitchell-Innes & Nash web site:
Mitchell-Innes
& Nash is pleased to present Colored
Waiting Room, the third solo exhibition of Pope.L at the gallery and his
second in the Chelsea space. This show’s
incorporation of drawing, painting, sculpture, and projections display the
artist’s versatility and use of various media in his practice.
The show’s
title, Colored Waiting Room,
interpolates an excess, an aberration of intentional language which seeks to
qualify division by defining identity.
The show’s title evokes a very particular historical moment,
specifically American racial segregation against blacks in the late 19th to mid
20th centuries. However, a literal
examination of the phrase opens the space to ‘nosier’, more flexible readings
of color, words and proximity in the context of art, science and culture.
In this
exhibition, Pope.L addresses a lack within language with a playfulness which is
both enigmatic and astute. As evident in
his Skin Set drawings, Pope.L collaborates with society’s use of color
terminology to characterize notions such as ontology, gender, race and social
value. The current exhibition includes a
large group of Skin Set works as well as two new, large-scale diptychs with a
‘cousin’ focus. In addition, through sound and olfactory pieces, the viewer is
invited to contemplate the exhibition through an almost synesthetic dialogue
with color.
By
creating an exhibition space that is both structurally and ideologically a
puzzle, Pope.L seeks to reconstruct the viewer via his or her own boundaries.
William
Pope.L was born in 1955 in New Jersey.
He currently lives and works in Chicago, IL, where he is an Associate
Professor in the Department of Visual Arts at the University of Chicago. He has had solo exhibitions at institutions
including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Carpenter Center at Harvard
University, the Santa Monica Museum of Art, and the Kunsthalle Wien. The MIT Press published a monograph to
accompany The Friendliest Black Artist in
America, his 2002-2004 traveling survey exhibition. His work has been exhibited and performed at
Museum of Modern Art in New York, The Whitney Museum in New York, Museum of
Contemporary Art Los Angeles, The New Museum in New York and the Renaissance
Society in Chicago. Recent exhibitions
and performances include Radical
Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art at Contemporary Arts Museum
Houston, Texas; Flux This! With Pope.L
and Special Guests at Museum of Modern Art in New York, NY; and The Long White Cloud, Te Tuhi Gallery,
Auckland, New Zealand.
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