Welcome 2 the Jungle
April 9 - 30, 2005
Opening: Saturday, April 9, 6-8 PM
Helen Altman Chris Ballantyne Isidro Blasco castaneda/reiman Zoe Crosher Kim Krans David Lefkowitz Mario M. Muller Maria E. Piñeres Christina Ray William Swanson Tony de los Reyes Timothy Tompkins
To inaugurate DCKT Contemporary’s new, independent space located at 552 West 24th Street we are pleased to announce Welcome 2 the Jungle, a group exhibition. Each artist included in the exhibition has previously had a one-person show with DCKT Contemporary and will present new work in our new habitat. Works include:
Helen Altman’s Who Am I?, a work from a new series of babies’ blankets, depicts a silhouette of a nestful of baby birds craning their young necks for food, oblivious to the embroidered snake entwined in the branches above. Altman says that the blankets “reference the fragile nature of infants and childhood in general...in most of the blankets something has gone slightly wrong....the central characters have been replaced by something you might not expect.”
Kim Krans’ recent solo debut at DCKT Contemporary was an ArtForum.com “Critic’s Pick” in which her work was described as “resurrecting the Romantic tradition of the sublime landscape.” Krans’ employs a combination of techniques in her newest large-scale work on paper, using collage and layering to break away from the logic of traditional drawing and historic landscape painting practices.
Mario M. Muller’s India ink on paper works are from a new series, “The Curb.” Renderings of urban street-sides are seen as plays on shadow and scale resulting in a fictionalized yet instantly recognizable portrait of contemporary metropolitan existence. Muller’s next one-person exhibition, Heaven or Las Vegas, will be on view at DCKT Contemporary from May 7th - June 18th, 2005. Muller was recently commissioned by the MTA Network Poster Program to interpret the New York City subway system and was named an Art in Transit commission finalist for the Kingsbridge Road Station in the Bronx.
Christina Ray is both observer and observed in drawings from her new “Visitor.Files” project. Ray documents the common flow of city sidewalk activity and translates the recorded observations into a visual code presented as a series of hand-drawn maps, each a unique graphic image of a specific location and time. The code Ray has developed for the maps uses geometric shapes to represent pedestrian movement, traffic and ambient activity and colors to represent days of the week, time and weather.
The exhibition will be on view at DCKT Contemporary, 552 West 24th Street, between 10th and 11th Avenues in Chelsea. Hours are 10am to 6pm, Tuesday through Saturday.
For further information or images, please contact Dennis Christie or Ken Tyburski at the gallery.
Dennis E. Christie
DCKT Contemporary, Inc.
552 West 24th Street
New York, NY 10011
Tel. 212/741-9955
