EXHIBITION IMAGES | PRESS RELEASE
“Everything leads us to believe that there is a certain state of mind from which life and death, the real and the imaginary, past and future, the communicable and the incommunicable, height and depth are no longer perceived as contradictory.
—André Breton, Second Manifesto of Surrealism (1929)
Halsey Mckay is pleased to present Sixth Sax, a group exhibition curated by Patrick Brennan with works by Colby Bird, Ned Colclough, Alex Da Corte, Sarah Dornner, Amy Granat, Jesse Hamerman, Joseph Hart, Adam McEwen, Ned Vena, and JD Walsh. Focused on sculpture, the show suggests the possibilities of working slightly outside or against expectation, with works that draw unlikely connections between historical forms to create their own, surreal language.
Known for moving fluidly between sculpture and photography, Colby Bird creates deft juxtapositions of shapes and material, precariously positioned in a way that dynamically engages the viewer and suggests a transitional state. Open-ended questions pervade works by JD Walsh, who activates loose connections and poetic meanings by interweaving disjunctive images, sound, and video, drawing from mass-media sources both loaded and banal. Amy Granat’s photographs engage the materiality of the image, creating layered compositions that collapse depth and surface, narrative and presence, the immediate and the distant. Ned Colclough’s assemblages fuse diverse references to modernist geometry, design, and décor, unified by precise composition, rhythm, and a seemingly effortless sense of balance. By contrast, Alex Da Corte takes a lurid, visceral approach to the residue of pop culture, creating strange hybrid objects at once gestural and romantic.
A more calculated operation is evident in other works, such as Jesse Hamerman’s slick wall-mounted hieroglyphs, symbol-objects which function at the boundary between popular recognition and impenetrability. Commercially fabricated graphite sculptures by Adam McEwen are exact facsimiles of consumer objects; as such, they are neither readymades nor minimal forms but something other, strangely emptied-out. The analytic abstractions of Sarah Dornner project architectural drawings and mathematical equations into three-dimensional space.
An interest in both transforming found material and using its existing qualities is most evident in work by Ned Vena, who uses the inherent properties of industrial products and inks most commonly associated with vandalism to re-open tropes of Abstract Expressionism and Minimalism, using a series of controlled accidents involving stencils, stains, and acid spills. Likewise balancing accident with intention, the collage-based works of Joseph Hart often find beginnings in disruption, cannibalizing prior works on paper and inserting them into new compositions.
Taken as a whole, Sixth Sax presents a tableaux full of subtle contradictions and dialectics. Interiors and exteriors, language and object, the immediate and mediated, accident and design, looseness and precision. Of these, looseness is maybe key. Letting oneself be haunted by past forms when tethering objects together—loose associations and taut thought in the studio. There is a love of history but a disregard for genre – or rather a love of genre as speculative material, leading to a free-flowing chain of objects and images.
– Natalie Campbell