NICK WAPLINGTON
NICK WAPLINGTON
Sit Up Straight, Eat from the Plate, Vegetables Meat, Pudding for a Treat

12 January ? 11 February, 2006
Opening Reception: Thursday, January 12, 6 ? 8pm
Hours: Tuesday ? Saturday 10am ? 6pm

 

Roebling Hall is extremely pleased to present Sit Up Straight, Eat from the Plate, Vegetables Meat, Pudding for a Treat, the first U.S. solo exhibition of the photographs of renowned British artist Nick Waplington in six years.

Spanning the period when Nick Waplington began making photographs in the early 1980s to the present day, Sit Up Straight, Eat from the Plate, Vegetables Meat, Pudding for a Treat features works from his latest, limited edition book You Love Life (Trolley Books), as well as several large scale new works, which have been ten years in the making. Saturated in color, these large format photographs expose, warts and all, the underlying, sometimes unnervingly surreal character of the every day. As Waplington states in the introduction to You Love Life, these photographs are ?a work about life and the choices I have made and the choices which have been made on my behalf.?

Waplington?s expansive photographic vision runs the gamut of lived experience, ranging widely over moments of genuine poetic beauty to images of the grotesque and the base. Traversing visual terrain as varied as a crowded London club to streams of rushing water in the Welsh countryside, Waplington invests his most personal experiences with universal significance. Witness an image of the birth of his son, as well the social ferment of the Glastonbury Music Festival. A fly on the wall during the unveiling of his own life and that of thousands of others, Waplington?s photography crashes the party or disaster that is everyday life, emerging with a visual record that is unique in its intimacy, kind-heartedness and, ultimately, compassion.

Beginning with his influential book Living Room (Aperture 1991), which featured introductions by Richard Avedon and John Berger, and later with his second book The Wedding (Aperture 1996), Waplington has continually produced compelling, powerful images that have achieved cult status in Britain and won numerous photographic awards.

Nick Waplington has exhibited in, among other venues, National Museum of Photography, Bradford, UK; Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia; Burden Gallery, Aperture, New York; Royal Photographic Society, Bath, UK; Norton Museum, Palm Springs, FL; and Museum 52, London. His work was featured at the 49th Venice Biennial and is presently in the collections of many of the world?s leading museums, among them: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia; The Royal Danish Photographic Museum, Copenhagen; National Gallery of Australia; The Glasgow Museum, Scotland.

For further information or images, please contact the gallery at or visit roeblinghall.com.

 

 

Sugar
Reynold Reynolds & Patrick Jolley with Samara Golden
2005
Still #1 from Sugar
C-print, 30 x 40 inches

22 November ? 7 January 2006
Opening Reception: Tuesday, 22 November, 6 ? 8 pm
Hours: Tuesday ? Saturday 10-6 PM

Roebling Hall is extremely pleased to present Sugar, an exhibition of intensely affecting new works of sculpture, photography and film by Reynold Reynolds & Patrick Jolley, in collaboration with the artist Samara Golden.

A woman comes out of a refrigerator, crawls across the floor, opens the heating vent and exhumes a corpse - her own. From this crisis point, Sugar tracks a journey into the vertiginous realms of the mind. Dissolving the parameters between reality and psychosis, dream and delusion, Reynolds and Jolley descend into a labyrinth created through the arresting performance of Samara Golden.

A small apartment is filled to overflowing with someone?s past. The protagonist opens the door, uncertain whether she is arriving or returning. As she struggles with the space, the camera shifts focus between agoraphobia, claustrophobia, the internal and the external, the watcher and the watched. Taking its cues from film history, Sugar moves through suspicion, voyeurism, murder, revenge, guilt and reconciliation. The nostalgic-elegiac quality of the footage, combined with the classical pacing of Reynolds and Jolley?s purposefully involuted story create an enveloping scene that floats uneasily between real-time drama and subjective, non-linear experience.

Accompanying the film loop, Reynolds and Jolley further explore these unsettling territories with the expansion of the film device at the centre of the story. This impossible ?three-dimensional film still? uses two life-size, hyper real sculptures to present a live self and a dead self in communion together. By means of this literal representation of the doeppelganger, Reynolds and Jolley allow for a sustained and powerful view of the dark, dead centre of the minds eye. A mix of the best hallucinogenic effects of both Duane Hanson and David Lynch, these sculptures in particular provide an hypnotic echo of life just beyond the threshold of the conventionally reasonable and the familiarly rational.

Reynold Reynolds & Patrick Jolley have exhibited in, among other venues, Tate Modern, London; National Gallery of Art, Washington DC; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles: Secession, Vienna: Havana Biennial, Havana, Cuba. Their films have shown in many international festivals, including Sundance, The Edinburgh Festival, and the Rotterdam Film Festival. Reynolds and Jolley?s 2003 project Burn will be exhibited at the 2007 Berlin Biennial.

For further information or images, please contact the gallery at or visit roeblinghall.com.

 

 

Richard Galpin
peeled photograph
Phase 2005
47 5/8 x 75 5/8"
 

October 18 ? November 19, 2005
Reception for the artist: Tuesday, October 18, 2005, 6 ? 9 pm
Hours: Tuesday ? Saturday 10-6 PM

Roebling Hall is very pleased to present the first solo show in the U.S. of London-based artist Richard Galpin.

By stripping back photographs of complex urban structures, Richard Galpin reveals fragmented forms in dynamic spatial compositions. Each work is a single photographic print that has been meticulously scored and peeled to remove certain areas of the surface emulsion. Interplay between the angular abstractions of the stripped white paper, and the pristine surface of the remaining photograph, results in a dazzling reconfiguration of space. Through this reductive process, new forms emerge.

For this exhibition, Galpin has produced several works based on the New York cityscape. In both ?Automaton? and ?Neo-capital? views of the Times Square area are reduced to a central cluster of elements which mass and take on a free-standing form of their own. The experience of the city that the work presents is one of stimulating disorientation, and delight in its formal pleasures. Simultaneously, Galpin?s increasingly complex reworking of his own photographs begins to contemplate a fantastical revolutionary reconstruction project.

Other works included in this exhibition focus on more singular structural forms. In Phase Two, a reworked building site appears as a launch pad projecting skyward, and in Fantasy Mouse and Odyssey the structures of roller coasters become dynamic and exuberant abstractions. These works are more playful, and less overtly architectural than the cityscape works, and yet proffer a similar kind of utopian optimism.

Galpin engages with the formal aspects of early modernist abstraction, Constructivism and Futurism, while also working with and against the forms within his original photographs. Inescapably bound to the present, the surface detail delivers traces of contemporary urban experience. However any reading of these works as a representation of an existing place and time is confounded by the artist?s radical revision of the image.

Richard Galpin has had solo exhibitions at Hales Gallery (London) and Galeria Leme (Sao Paulo). His work has been selected for a variety of survey shows that investigate alternative uses of photography such as: Attack:Attraction, Painting/Photography at the Marcel Sitcoske Gallery (San Francisco), The Photograph in Question at Von Lintel Gallery (New York), and Looking With/Out at the Courthauld Institute of Art (London). He was recently selected by the magazine Art Review as one of the art world?s top One Hundred Emerging Artists

For further information or images, please contact the gallery at or visit roeblinghall.com.

 

 

Nancy Drew 
More Today Than Yesterday

More Today Than Yesterday
Nancy Drew
(Click for images, directions)

Opening Reception: Friday, May 20, 6 ? 8 pm
Show Dates: May 20 ? June 18, 2005

Hours: Tuesday-Saturday 10am-6 PM or by appointment

 

Roebling Hall is very pleased to present More Today Than Yesterday, an exhibition of the paintings of Nancy Drew.

For her second solo exhibition, Nancy Drew ups the ante on her sparkling and fuzzy soft renditions of the modern masters. Aptly titled, More Today Than Yesterday, Drew continues to riff on and refashion the once avant-garde works of mid-century mega stars, which have now become the pillars of museum collections and the archetypal paintings of a bygone era.

Revisiting the likes of Clifford Still, Jackson Pollock, Jasper Johns and Lucio Fontana, among others, Drew packs a visual punch that echoes back and forth between past and present. On the one hand, Drew mines the iconic significance and magnetic power of the past by reworking undeniably recognizable masterpieces. At the same time, the works pop forward into the present through her use of uncharacteristic materials such as glitter, flocking and Swarovski crystals. The upfront and in-your-face flashiness of the works give them a contemporary bling, in contrast to the staid stature of the original works on which she riffs.

In the Now & Then series, Drew skews and twists the rigorous grids of Mondrian into dynamic distortions of what they once were. Expanding her range of scale and amping up the color combinations of her glitter and flocking, Drew pushes past the territories of appropriation and reverence, totally transforming the referenced works into scintillating, luscious paintings very much her own.

Nancy Drew recently exhibited in Open House: Brooklyn Art Today at the Brooklyn Museum. Her work was included in Repeat Performance at Artists Space in New York, as well as BQE at White Box, New York.

 


 

 

Guy Richards Smit
Nausea2

Nausea2
   

Reception: Saturday, April 16, 6-8 PM
April 16 ? May 14
Hours: Friday ? Monday 12-6 PM

Roebling Hall is very pleased to present Nausea 2, Guy Richards Smit?s porn rock opera, which premiered last December at MoMA.

Nausea 2 is a feature length video project in the tradition of cinematic rock operas. It is the absurdist journey of two adult film stars through crippling doubt, self-discovery, healing and finally ? thanks to an ecstatic fashion-filled shopping spree ? unconditional love. Smit?s carnal, rocking, stylish and hilarious tale doubles as a pop critique of the contemporary art world as it exposes the eternal themes of love and vanity.

After achieving stardom in the art world and literary circles, Guy Richards Smit?s character Maxi Geil! experiences a physical repulsion to his vocation as an adult film star and is left unable to perform. He calls a press conference to announce his retirement, and there he meets another adult film star, Giselle Thurst (Rebecca Chamberlain), who has experienced a similar physical reaction to her work. They bond but are thwarted in their search for help. Ultimately, they achieve a state of ecstasy and healing by way of high fashion consumption.

Written, starring and directed by Guy Richards Smit, Nausea 2 features the music of Smit?s band Maxi Geil! & PlayColt. Time Out New York has described the band as a ?glammy art-rock group whose sly, tuneful music hearkens back to early Bowie and Roxy Music, with all the camp, drama and fabulousness the description implies. The band is tight and funky, and backing vocalist Rebecca Chamberlain's purr makes us weak in the knees." In addition to Smit and Chamberlain, the supporting cast includes the fantastic Zoe Lister-Jones as a young conflicted starlet and King Lou Fernandez as Maxi Geil's loyal manager. Nausea 2 features a cameo studded roster of art world notables such as Leo Fitzpatrick (Kids), Delia Brown, Fritz Chesnut, Chris Chiappa, Will Cotton, Tony Matelli, John Pilson, and many others.

Also included in the exhibition are a number of Guy Richards Smit?s hilarious watercolors that riff on the front pages of The New York Times. With dark humor and painterly panache, Smit evokes an emotional response to current events that is half interior-life diary and half old-fashioned social commentary.

The production of Nausea 2 was partially funded by the Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art. Additional funding was provided by the MAT Charitable Foundation. Clothes supplied by Amarcord; make-up by 3 Custom Color; post-production by Subvoyant; incidental music by David Abir; music produced and recorded by Roger Fife; produced by Ami Armstrong.

Guy Richards Smit has previously exhibited his work in, among other venues, Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art, MOMA?s Mediascope, La Bienal de Valencia, the Havana Biennial, the Palm Beach Institute of Contemporary Art, the Bass Museum of Art, Aeroplastics (Brussels), and G-Module (Paris).
Guy Richards Smit has upcoming exhibitions at Sketch (June 2005) and the new Fred (London) Ltd (June 2005), both in London, UK.


 

 

John Lurie
January 14 ? February 26, 2005
Bear Surprise
Watercolor and oil pastel on paper
16 x 12 inches : 40.6 x 30.5 cm
John Lurie

January 14 ? February 26, 2005
Reception for the artist: Friday, January 14, 2005
Hours: Tuesday ? Saturday 10-6 PM

(Click for images, directions)

Roebling Hall is extremely pleased to present an exhibition of works on paper by visionary artist John Lurie.

For over 30 years, Lurie has been drawing and painting yet only recently has he chosen to exhibit. Once again, Lurie brings his own genuine and soulful touch to the world, combining a stylistic naïveté with incisive, wry humor.

John Lurie?s drawings and paintings express a disarming mixture of corrosive wit, raw emotion and unblemished sensitivity. His drawings bear the mark of an outsider, a quality present throughout his idiosyncratic career, whether in music, acting or the countless film scores he has written. To quote the artist: ?I like to draw and paint. It is a river to me. I am not an Indian.?

Born in Minneapolis, Minnesota in 1952, John Lurie moved to New York in 1976. During this time, he formed the musical group the Lounge Lizards. In the mid-80's, he scored and starred in the cult classics "Stranger Than Paradise" and "Down By Law." He has scored countless films and was nominated for a Grammy for "Get Shorty." In the late 90's, he directed and acted in "Fishing With John," his own TV series on the Independent Film Channel, which has been described as "Jacques Cousteau on LSD."

John Lurie has exhibited his art in the United States and Europe with shows at Galerie Daniel Blau in Munich, Germany and Anton Kern Gallery in New York. The Museum of Modern Art recently acquired five drawings for the permanent collection.

For further information or images, please contact the gallery at or visit roeblinghall.com.

 

 

 

 

Adriana Arenas - Erik Benson - Jane Benson - Sebastiaan Bremer - Paul Campbell - Christoph Draeger

Nancy Drew - Richard Galpin -Dan Ford- Cadence Giersbach - Deborah Grant - Kevin Francis Gray
Kysa Johnson - Nelson Leirner - Bjørn Melhus - Christoph Morlinghaus - Ivan Navárro -David Opdyke
Reynold Reynolds & Patrick Jolley - Guy Richards Smit - Courtney Smith - Spessi - Eve Sussman

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Roebling Hall : Brooklyn
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