Christopher Knowles, Josephine Pryde and Becky Suss at Institute of Contemporary Art: September 16-December 27 |
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September 15, 2015, Volume 62, No. 05 |
Three exhibitions will open on Wednesday, September 16 at Institute of Contemporary Art, 118 South 36th Street. A members-only event at 5 p.m. will be followed by a public reception from 6-9 p.m. The exhibitions will run through December 27. For more information, visit www.icaphila.org/exhibitions
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Christopher Knowles, Untitled, 2014, oil marker on canvas, 40 x 40
inches. Courtesy of the artist and Gavin Brown’s enterprise, New York. |
Christopher Knowles: In a Word
Christopher Knowles is regarded as a poet and painter, yet his output is broader than this suggests. This exhibition, his most comprehensive to date, spans many media—text, sound, painting, drawing, sculpture and performance—including pieces made in collaboration with esteemed theater director Robert Wilson. The work records and reorders the everyday materials around us using incantatory rhythms and repetition. Typings of language permutations, reimagined song lyrics and interlocking blocks of raw color commonly depict family and close friends. Sculptures are precise and direct in construction: polka-dotted cones, brilliantly hued paper cutouts, Lego structures and accumulations of wind-up alarm clocks. Performances feature daily routines rendered into theatrical exaggeration.
This exhibition was co-organized by chief curator Anthony Elms and guest curator Hilton Als, writer and chief theater critic for The New Yorker. |
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Josephine Pryde, Gift For Me, Simon Lee Gallery Christmas 2013 (1), 2015, Giclée print, 23 1/4 x 15 1/2 inches, edition 3/3. Courtesy of Reena Spaulings Fine Art, New York; Simon Lee Gallery, London and Galerie Neu, Berlin. |
Josephine Pryde: lapses in Thinking By the person i Am
Josephine Pryde presents a new body of commissioned work for her first United States museum exhibition. It could be said that the composition, lighting and general style of Ms. Pryde’s photographs recall fashion and portrait photography, but this would ignore the fact that fashion and portrait photography refer to art photographs, snapshots, documentary footage and more. This exhibition includes more than 20 photographs of hands shot with a macro lens so that detail can be enlarged in the final frame. The hands have brightly painted nails and are depicted in contact with a range of touch-sensitive devices—lamps, tablets, phones, human chests. The photographs may be viewed on foot; alternately, a fully functioning miniature rideable train offers visitors a short trip along the route of the show.
This exhibition was organized for CCA Wattis Institute in San Francisco by curator and head of programs Jamie Stevens, and organized at ICA by chief curator Anthony Elms. |
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Becky Suss, Living Room (six paintings, four plates), 2015, oil on canvas, 84 x 108 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Fleisher/Ollman, Philadelphia. |
Becky Suss
Becky Suss presents selections from her most recent body of work in her first solo museum exhibition. These meditative, large-scale paintings, augmented by smaller studies in oil and ceramic, reimagine the domestic spaces of her relatives with a focus on her late grandparents’ mid-century suburban home. The flattened architecture and exaggerated perspective of Ms. Suss’s canvases memorialize their collected art and objects through an intimate, archeological process that opens familial narrative to questions of class, politics and religion. Echoed in these works are the migratory shifts and political climates of Cold War America, from suburban sprawl to the Red Scare. Psychic and physical space is conflated as Ms. Suss works through memories and mythologies embedded within these interiors. Her ICA exhibition expands this inquiry with several new canvases and experiments in larger, more labor-intensive ceramic forms.
This exhibition was organized by ICA associate curator Kate Kraczon.
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