DUST STUTTER
February 10 - March 12, 2017Opening Reception: February 10, 7-9 PM
Essex Flowers is pleased to present Dust Stutter, an exhibition of work by Andres Laracuente and Megan Pahmier.
Dust remains invisible until enough of it accumulates. It both announces and obscures the place where it gathers, alerts us to the edges of things while simultaneously softening or clouding them. Likewise the works shown here shift our attention from their surfaces to their mechanisms of support and their relations to their immediate surroundings. Both artists have developed practices that attend very closely to the particular qualities and associations of their chosen materials, designing encounters that give primacy to tactility and spatial awareness.
Pahmier's pieces rely on slight movements: extruding a single coil of clay, allowing moisture to escape the skin, trapping a shallow space under a plexi box. She describes her approach as "a mode of attention, an engagement with materiality that is neither practical or instrumental, but concerns itself with the possibility of being and acting with matter, rather than upon it."
With his recent work Laracuente takes an interest in materials that function as second skins: clothing, poly packaging and industrial coatings. He refers to a process of "augmentation or multiplication, creating third skins and redundancy." By defamiliarizing commonplace objects and exploiting their unique capabilities, he forefronts the multitude of states related to the cooperation of inside-outside, surface-substance. In the work "Poly-cooperation Pointed Areas," the heat sealed lines bind the lightweight poly fiber providing structural integrity, lending presence to an indistinct material.
In both artists' work, the raw materials on display do their intended jobs - preserving, capturing, linking - and yet remain somehow unaffected. They are spent, but assert their own autonomy by resisting transformation.
Andres Laracuente is currently based in New York. His practice is cross-disciplinary, with recent emphasis on sculpture and new media. Laracuente has exhibited in the US, Europe and Asia. His work has been featured in the New York Times, and Document Journal. Upcoming exhibitions will be held at The Knockdown Center Brooklyn, Galerie Yukiko Kawase Paris (Mar 2017) and Galerie Veda, Florence (May 2017).
Megan Pahmier lives and works in New York. She received her Bachelor of Fine Arts in painting from Maryland Institute College of Art and completed her Master of Fine Arts at Hunter College. Her work has been shown at institutions such as the Corcoran Gallery of Art, The Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the School 33 Art Center. Most recently her work was included in the New York exhibitions Drawing for Sculpture at TSA Gallery and Future Fossils at Dutton Gallery as well as Hand, Finger, Digit at The Old Hairdressers in Glasgow, Scotland. Her work will be included in the upcoming exhibition, Occasional Table at the Knockdown Center in Queens, NY.
