Sue Williams Paintings And Collages @ 303 Gallery In New York

In 2020, the brutal reality of living in the waning days of American Empire has allowed Williams to consider how we might have arrived at this point. Her new paintings are suffused with images of colonial times: disembodied Pilgrim clogs, Tudor cabins, horses outfitted with blinders, the literal nuts & bolts that prefigured the industrial revolution, Betsy Ross as a dinosaur. The suggestion that America is founded on violence and manipulation, that the post-truth, post-Trump, post-COVID world is not an anomaly but a continuation of a status quo built over the past 400 years, doesn't seem far-fetched. A painting titled "Land Of Profit and Coincidence" would resonate equally in 1620 or 2020.

There is a wry and impertinent classicism in Williams' compositions - at first glance, they suggest the kind of maps early land surveyors might use. They also may intimate the strewn wreckage of a natural disaster, here the relentless and sadistic subversion of democracy, the American dream, and E Pluribus Unum. Couched in the archetypal imagery of our noble forefathers, of amber waves of grain and purple mountain majesties, American idyll itself becomes Machiavellian. Williams herself sums it up with two quotes: "The American people are the most brainwashed in the world" (Adam Curtis), and a hopeful note courtesy of Woody Guthrie: "You fascists never gonna win."

Sue Williams’ solo exhibition is on view through January 30 @ 303 Gallery 555 W 21st Street

Valentin Carron Presents "Sing Loud And Walk Fast" @ 303 Gallery In New York

For all its promise of liberation from the gilded structures of exaltation surrounding the objet d'art, the readymade has become deflated by its own pressure. Found objects, assemblage and appropriation have been cunningly adopted and integrated into the mechanisms of taste, robbed of their subversive function and aestheticized into a polite paradigm. In a series of nine new collages upending these platitudes, Valentin Carron locates within his own psychology the entry points for the subconscious material of identity and freezes them, allowing for unexpected and arbitrary recombination that short-circuits accepted modes of explication. Sing Loud And Walk Fast will be on view through July 12 at 303 Gallery 555 W 21 Street New York. photographs courtesy of the gallery

Sam Falls' Solo Exhibition @ 303 Gallery In New York

 
 

Sublimating the natural world in works that both defy and embrace the basic functions of art, Sam Falls' works record specific moments in time as well as the infinite human impulse to commune with nature. For the series of paintings on view, Falls brings large sheets of canvas into the deepest corners of America's national parks, covering them with dry pigments and arranging bracken and found flora to create intricate patterns. These arrangements are then left exposed to the elements, where dewdrops, mist, rain, sun and atmosphere activate the pigments. This process, similar to a photogram, records not only the formal qualities of the plant life, but also a semblance of the psychological and climatic substrata that constitute a tenuous definition of 'place.' These works, large in a New York gallery but mere blips in the overwhelming space of nature, point to the inescapable omnipresence of the natural world in our lives outside society - the circadian rhythms and innate formal reflexes that determine what might be interpreted as beautiful, optimistic, pleasing, virtuous, ominous, or frightening. That nature itself has been perhaps the most pervasive concern of art since the beginning of mark-making should be no surprise. Sam Falls' exhibition is on view from September 12 to October 20 at 303 Gallery 555 W 21 Street, New York.
 

Kim Gordon "Design Office: The City Is A Garden" @ 303 Gallery in New York

303 Gallery presents "Design Office: The City Is A Garden," the gallery's first solo exhibition of new works by Kim Gordon. In this new body of work, Gordon's primary concern is the radical change in the landscape of New York City over the past several years. For the past 20 years Chelsea has been a center of urban renovation, including the opening of the highline in 2009. Small parks appear randomly in the middle of a street. Outdoor sculptures often accompany the arrangements. The new lushness of New York would seem to reimagine NYC as a city for the people, as well as a more attractive landscape for new consumers. Kim Gordon "Design Office: The City Is A Garden" will be on view until July 24, 2015 at 303 Gallery. 

Karen Kilimnik & Kim Gordon at 303 Gallery

303 Gallery presents it's eleventh exhibition of work by Karen Kilimnik, and first two-person show with Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth. For this show, both Kilimnik and Gordon will present video installations addressing the nature of performance, its definition and its influence. On view until September 29 at 303 Gallery, 547 W 21st Street, New York, NY