Thomas Kovachevich
Callicoon Fine Arts is pleased to present a two-person exhibition of paintings by Jenny Monick with installed artworks by Thomas Kovachevich, opening on Wednesday June 24th with a reception from 6 to 8pm, and ending on Thursday, July 30th. For this exhibition both artists, using their respective means, position the activity of their work at the edges of the picture and the corners of the gallery.
Furthering this exploration of liminality, the gallery will host a screening of a looped film by G.B. Jones on Saturday July 18th, from 9pm to 4am. Organized by Dirty Looks as part of their month-long On Location series of screenings, the film will be projected against the storefront glass and will be viewable from the sidewalk while the gallery is closed.
In Jenny Monick’s paintings, mark-making occurs along the edges of her canvases. There, using a stencil and spray paint, she applies areas of overlapping colors, framing a monochromatic or raw canvas ground. The simplicity of her approach and her intuitive way forward belies the rigor of her endeavor in painting, the risk involved in attempting to define a sense of emptiness. Each work touches on this impossibility, a paradox of edge and center.
Thomas Kovachevich’s contributions are comprised of paper tape and ribbon installed in vertical strips. Running floor to ceiling, the three inch wide paper tape is topped with a length of grosgrain ribbon and both are nailed to the wall at the top and bottom. Previously these types of works formed large pictorial formats, but here each is limited to selected corners of the gallery room. The tape curls and uncurls around the ribbon over time as the level of humidity in the room changes, thereby implicating the whole room as a volume.
Jenny Monick was born in Minneapolis, MN, and lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Monick has exhibited in national and international galleries and non-profit institutions such as Greene Naftali, New York; Gallery Lelong, New York; White Columns, New York; Art:Concept, Paris; The Drawing Center, New York; The Pineapple, Malmö, Sweden; The Aldrich Museum, Ridgefield, CT; D’Amelio Terras Gallery, New York; Reserve Ames, Los Angeles, CA; Kiria Koula, San Francisco, CA; among others. Her work has been featured in Art in America, Art on Paper, and has been reviewed on several occasions by The New York Times.
Thomas Kovachevich was born in Detroit, MI, and lives and works in New York. He has had one-person exhibitions at The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, The Albert and Vera List Center at MIT, The Corcoran Gallery of Art, The Santa Monica Museum of Art; at galleries such as Galerie de France, Farideh Cadot and Berggruen & Cie, all Paris, Francesca Pia, Bern, and Curt Marcus, NY. Significant group exhibitions include Documenta 5, exhibitions at The Museum of Modern Art, NY, The Detroit Institute of Art, The Art Institute of Chicago, COCO Kunstverein, Vienna, and Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin.
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Dirty Looks: On Location at Callicoon Fine Arts:
G.B. Jones, Hot Dogs, super 8mm on HD video, 1:34 min. (loop), 1987/2015
Saturday, July 18, 9pm–4am
Callicoon Fine Arts, 49 Delancey Street
Toronto punk icon G.B. Jones' Hot Dogs is a short, bite-sized video of juicy wieners slowly turning on their warming spigots, here looped in tantalizing and mundane perpetuity. Hot Dogs can be seen as a wry meditation on our society's phallocentrism and in dialogue with the Lower East Side's rich history of sidewalk vending and cruising (two activities which intermingle outside the public washrooms of near-by intersection Delancey and Allen). Curator: Videofag
www.onlocation.dirtylooksnyc.org