Exhibitions & Fairs

NYC - ROY G BIV

From 16 November to 21 December 2011

WATERHOUSE & DODD NEW YORK is pleased to present ROY G BIV, a group exhibition curated by Trong G. Nguyen and featuring works by Ryan Brennan, Ellen Carey, Brookhart Jonquil, Dan Levenson, Markus Linnenbrink, Robert Minervini, Christian Nguyen, Miguel Palma, Anselm Reyle, Xaviera Simmons, Pascual Sisto, Joey Syta, and Letha Wilson. The exhibition title is a peripheral nod to the recently ratified same-sex marriage act in New York. But like the symbolic rainbow, what at first appears supernatural dissipates, betraying any inherent gestures toward narrow ethics of the "past," or anything terrestrial, for that matter. Rather, the works in ROY G BIV are concept-driven aesthetics that point to a here-and-now, occupying a space "somewhere underneath the rainbow." The selection is marked by variants of re-symbolized color, fractured orders of nature and architecture, and fictional prisms through which reality eventually makes its most sense.

Beginning at the top arc of visibility, Markus Linnenbrink's dripped colorful paint lines rain down over enlarged vernacular photographs underneath. A de-saturated image taken by the artist's father in Pakistan of men in a truck finds something new to cling on to. Such a kaleidoscopic view can also be found in Ryan Brennan's wild collages depicting sensational narratives that appropriately burst out of their unconventional frames. These refracted tales zip neatly back to Letha Wilson's nature photographs, which in turn have been forcefully intervened with real material objects.

Dan Levenson's project of fictional Swiss artists (Little Switzerland) is represented by a very Scandinavian, readymade wooden cabinet of "student paintings." "Aged" canvases depict monochrome color studies and give life to a movement that "was" and "is." An equally weird and uncanny sense of nature is marked by Pascual Sisto's pigment "explosions" in the landscape, Joey Syta's re-creation of the Lady and the Unicorn tapestry in Lite Brite, and Robert Minervini's windows out to somebody's version of utopia. The beautiful but somewhat threatening landscape is also encountered in Xaviera Simmons' photograph of a playful confrontation. Jason Irwin's mirrored windows look out falsely into itself, while Miguel Palma's color making machine seems to extrude the contents of a color swatch book.

New symmetries are further reconstituted in the identically crumbled sheets of paper by Brookhart Jonquil, which find their kin in Anselm Reyle and Ellen Carey's creased abstractions. Patterns of reality find a new bearing in Christian Nguyen's paintings of fictitious architecture, as buildings drawn in graphite are resin-coated and registered with floating, colored dot matrices. Like Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo, and Violet, the colors break up into their constituent selves, leaving what we've created behind in faint clouds of molecular dust.

Opening reception, Wednesday 16th November 6 - 8pm

104 Greene Street, New York NY 10012