The Sputtering, Human-Shaped Machine

Curated by Jerry Blackman

January 13th - February 19th 

Opening reception:
Friday January 13th 2017, 6 - 9 PM

Phillip Birch, Alex Bunn, Nathaniel Lieb, Maya Manvi and Deirdre Sargent


There is a trope within the science fiction film genre where a seemingly human character is revealed to be an android. This is done through any number of techniques: in the Terminator films, the human flesh is burned or blasted off to reveal a shiny chrome robot skull. In the Alien franchise the androids are more fluid-based, and the contrast between the mechanical and the organic forms is more subtle. Some of the androids in Steven Spielberg’s A.I. and similarly in Michael Crichton’s Westworld open cleanly with doors pivoting elaborately at previously unseen seams. Whatever the case, the formal punch of this image is consistently seductive, terrifying, and saturated with visual power and metaphor. It is the moment that our fantasies collapse. It’s the material of a thing’s manufacture articulating itself. A reminder of the ephemerality of all things, and a dark proposal for our frail human futures.

For The Sputtering, Human-Shaped Machine, I’ve asked five artists whose work I know deals with both materiality and science-fiction-themes to consider this prompt and respond with a work however they feel is appropriate. The idea of skins and membranes is pervasive throughout the show, as is the motif of a work’s infrastructure being activated. Phillip Birch’s bust of Constantine quite overtly positions an interior narrative in conflict with an exterior shell. Here Birch is riffing off of the fringe-conspiracy-culture claim that some of primitive civilization’s notable and influential accomplishments might have in fact been the doings of aliens. His response to this is to posit that the modern world too might have had some of it’s figures hijacked by alien intelligence. Constantine, who was the first Roman Emperor to convert to Christianity and, in turn, promote its spread through Europe, is seen here as a hollow skin with an elaborate, cosmic warp within it: like a puppet with an unknowable intelligence at the controls. Alex Bunn’s image similarly plays with the ambiguity of boundaries and the relationship between vessels and what they might contain. Just on the periphery of representation, Bunn builds intricate environments and photographs them for large scale so what we see might be from under a microscope or from an airplane window. Taking cues from medical equipment, horror films, and architectural models, Bunn conjures harrowing moods latent with foreboding and panic. The formal play between surface and interiority is pursued again in Nathaniel Lieb’s ceramic pieces. These barnacle like constructions hang in the gallery like some sort of alien fungus, slowly accumulating and growing to take over the spaceship. Their dirt colored skin provides the perfect incubator for the incongruous textures within. Lieb is a seasoned maker of things often taking simple forms, processes, or materials and pushing them to their limits to arrive at potent metaphors. Maya Manvi’s video Baptismal Font splices differently textured stories ranging from the mythological to the info-graphical in exploration of how bodies arrive at their humanity within the fray of language, image, sound, and science. The work weaves together a brutalist 1970’s water park, the rituals of cells as they collapse breast milk canals (and the ironically dilapidated lab they are studied in), the sculpting of reality TV editors, and a story told throughout 60 years -when, once, a man was cured of his childhood asthma by swallowing a live fish. Together these vignettes explore how soft slippages, decay, and accident make up the machinery of being human. The photographic triptych and companion portrait are part of a larger ongoing project by Deirdre Sargent about social media star Valeria Lukyanova, ‘The Human Barbie Doll’. Lukyanova claims to be an alien life form many thousands of years old who has inhabited scores of human hosts. In interviews between Sargent and her muse, who resides predominantly in Mexico and communicates in Russian through her husband’s broken translation, she continually refutes the possibility of her death. Her highly manicured persona along with her 424k Instagram followers offers some version of this proposal, but the utopian fantasy shows growing signs of weariness as the inevitable rises like the tide.

-Jerry Blackman



Phillip Birch, (b. 1978, Detroit, MI) received his BFA from the College for Creative Studies, Detroit. Recent solo exhibitions include Entering God Mode at Essex Flowers, NY and Master Dynamic: Frontier at Lyles and King, NY. He also recently participated in NY’s Sculpture Center’s annual InPractice open call juried exhibition Fantasy Can Invent Nothing New. Birch is adjunct professor at The City College of New York, and currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

Alex Bunn, (b. 1975, London, ENG) lives and works in London and Oslo, NO. His first institutional solo show opened at Trafo Kunsthall, Oslo in 2016 to national critical acclaim. Previously, his work has been exhibited at the Frieze Art Fair, The Royal Institution, and the Victoria and Albert museum in solo shows in London, Oslo, and Oakland as well as group shows in London, New York, Stockholm, Oslo, and Tokyo . His work has also appeared in Aesthetica, I-D, and Nature, among others.

Nathaniel Lieb, (b. 1963, Boston, MA) received his MFA from CUNY Brooklyn College, NY and his BFA from Syracuse University. Exhibitions include Morongo: AZ West’s, High Desert Test Sites, Joshua Tree CA, Governors Island Art Fair, Governors Island NY, Gimme Shelter: Woodstock Birdcliffe Guild, Woodstock NY and IN-SITES: the intersection of art and architecture, South Orange. He was most recently artist in residence at Amherst College, MA.

Maya Manvi, (b. 1987, Los Angeles, CA) works with sculpture, text, and moving image. Their works have been exhibited in San Francisco, New York, and elsewhere. They are currently co editing/curating a year long archiving project of OUT/look an intersectional 1980’s queer publication, that will be exhibited in October of 2017. Manvi received an MFA in sculpture from the Yale University School of Art, New Haven, CT in 2014 and a BFA from UC Santa Cruz, CA in 2009. They are a visiting professor of Sculpture at Caldwell University and lives and work in New York.

Deirdre Sargent, (b. 1985, Boston, MA) received her MFA from Yale University in 2013, and her BFA from Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, NY in 2008. Recent solo and two-person shows include You Should Know When to Laugh at 315 Gallery, NYC, Island Girl on Video, AC Institute, NYC, and Mod Coms at The Arta Center Gallery, MA. She is adjunct professor at The College of New Jersey and currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

Ilana Savdie, Cucumber QT, 2016

Good Work Gallery presents: “Vital Enhancements”

Curated by Sara Blazej

Opening reception Saturday, June 25, 6 – 9 PM
Open by appointment (Please contact Info@goodworkgallery.com)

Featuring work by:
Alexander Heffesse
Aria MacManus & Raine Trainor
Signe Pierce
Ilana Savdie
Cecilia Salama
With performances to be announced by Allison Brainard and others…

Vital Enhancements brings together artists exploring the relation between anxiety, optimism and the consumer impulse central to commercial Wellness culture.

In her 2013 monograph Cruel Optimism, theorist Laurie Berlant describes optimistic relations as mobilizing forces that pull us out of ourselves and into the world, ostensibly leading us closer to our ultimate desires. These relations may involve food, a kind of love, or simply a new habit which promises to induce an improved way of being, yet they stand to become toxic when the aspirational object impedes the overall aim that brought us to it initially. This dynamic, according to Berlant, culminates in a relation of “cruel optimism” fueled by cycles of hope, consumption, and disappointment. It is through the lens of this sentiment that Vital Enhancements looks at the mechanisms driving commercial Wellness culture as we experience it’s growing influence on the physical and mental landscapes of modern life.

Predicated on a rhetoric of improvement, perfection and longevity, the Wellness mentality best finds footing within individualist, consumer populations obsessively concerned with personal value and delaying physical and moral decay. As this mentality is easily commodified in a visual culture where desires are manifested through aspirational mass media and advertising, the notion of a more perfect self tends to find shape not in an evolved, abstract sense of well-being, but rather settles in various prescriptive consumer products and systems: anti-aging items, nutritional regimens, fitness programs, etc. This exhibition plays formally with these objects of optimism – each a well packaged promise within a series of promises made by an industry based on guaranteed results. It explores our subjective relationship to the things designed to provoke in us an excitement for a better self in a brighter future while habituating the impulse to buy and buy into.

The featured works draw on the visual language and materiality of Health, Fitness and Beauty products, deconstructing and recontextualizing familiar items of enhancement to reflect the unease and absurdity of being marketed one’s own self improvement. In varying ways they examine the roles of underlying neuroses, manufactured hopefulness and compulsive consumer behavior in cuing and commodifying a population’s appetite for “beauty, health and happiness.” Signe Pierce turns utopian marketing tropes in on themselves with advertorial visions of surreal dystopian spa interiors. Her photographs suggest spaces and apparel designed in another dimension for another breed of humans without affect, while Aria MacManus and Raine Trainor confront the anxieties facing the humans of now. They seek to alleviate the humiliation of routine body maintenance with HYGENIUS, a series of whimsical product innovations sleekly designed for discreet self care in the public domain. Of this series, they present Sheer Udder Brilliance, a multipurpose luxury purse which will be submitted for patent upon purchase. Alexander Heffesse’s wall sculpture also takes the form of consumer goods, but alternatively, his grocery store beverage display suggests availability for mass consumption. Heffesse’s melting gradient of Vita Coco bottles and halved football coconuts present a conversation between the physical properties of coconut oil and paraffin wax, disrupting our perception of the items we purchase and ingest beyond their highly palatable manufactured presentation. Cecilia Salama assembles work out items to weave a narrative around her obsession with a YouTube gymnast, connecting with her fantasy through the instruments and imagery on which she and her online viewers base her identity. In a move to reclaim commercial imagery for creative expression, Ilana Savdie digitally renders cosmetic facial masks into frenzied abstractions with the same Photoshop retouching palette used in their creation, ultimately transforming them into intoxicatingly vivid large scale paintings.

Sara Blazej

Brooklyn, NY 2016

Good Work Gallery invites you to the unveiling of new wall pieces by Scott Goodman in conjunction with The Moran Bondaroff Holiday Party and Knowledge Wave at  Santos Party House. The evening will feature performances curated by Sara Blazej in which performers Bebe Yama, Rebecca Fin Simonetti, SADAF and others will offer complementary views on the topic of visual disruption familiar to Goodman’s work.

Being activated by black light, the murals’ lines bear an iridescent, foggy glow that belies their ostensibly flat, graphic means of articulation. Similarly oppositional, as this soft glow is, to the hard lines it emanates from. Its rigid pattern defines within each mural, that which is established only to relax and dissolve. Square tiling in the stairwell to the south of the venue undulates like caustic light at the bottom of a swimming pool. While a stone wall in the north stairwell swirls like cappuccino foam in the hands of an expert barista. Patio rocks warp, torque and flex around the venue’s upstairs room leaving viewers immersed in an interior space made of exterior features that is as hard and flat as it is malleable and soft.

Scott Goodman was born in 1983, is a graduate of The Cooper Union, and is the founder of Good Work Gallery.

The Lorax Poems
Good Work Gallery is pleased to present The Lorax Poems, a group exhibition curated by Zach Smith, featuring:
Michael Assiff
Morgan Blair
Mikkel Carl
Carson Fisk-Vittori
Ani Geragosian
Ella Goerner
Cecilia Salama
Jo Shane
Opening...

The Lorax Poems

Good Work Gallery is pleased to present The Lorax Poems, a group exhibition curated by Zach Smith, featuring:

Michael Assiff
Morgan Blair
Mikkel Carl
Carson Fisk-Vittori
Ani Geragosian
Ella Goerner
Cecilia Salama
Jo Shane

Opening October 3rd, 6pm to 9pm

The show navigates the space between science and poetry. Subsisting off a media diet by turns populist and academic, it highlights artists for whom environmental awareness takes myriad forms. Hopefully, here, a paean to the natural world emerges.

“All day most days we adapt in microscopic ways, folding our habits in upon themselves. When possible we entertain eclectic viewpoints, scan bursts of image and description, flit through global events like specks on a windshield. Through artisanal everything and a deluge of apps we enter feedback loops of self-fulfilling innovation. We teeter on the edge of a legitimately vicious cycle: changing how we change, improving on ways we improve. And if it was too late we probably wouldn’t know… which all sounds pretty pessimistic, as it’s intended to.

We need tons of inconvenient truths constantly hurled at us, even as time renders most of them unfounded, bogus and annoying. A select few may turn out very real, to resonate and shake our plodding dialogue into new shapes, which art as a micro-world and the real world as itself need to thrive.

Unfortunately, full-blown jeremiads don’t do well with audiences. So to protect this one from the dull ears it might fall on otherwise, one revered literary figure comes to mind.

The Lorax is forest entity famous for saying things nobody wants to hear. A living torrent of dissent, this Dr. Seuss masterstroke eventually becomes so grating that self-banishment seems like the right thing to do. He disappears forever at which point everyone misses him. Turns out he was right about a lot of stuff, chiefly that the natural world demands our full attention.

This exhibition gathers, far and wide, the work of artists who encounter nature as built on something akin to poetry, more than just a string of networks. To get there though, they embrace absolutely current science and up-to-date academic research. The cohort’s output also speaks of lucid familiarity with hypermodern, urbane lifestyles. So, a rare balance is struck here between sublime encounters with the uncanny and snapshots of our feverish half-digital everyday, all maintaining a taste for empirical detail. This omnivorous approach opens new avenues for brazen lateral conjecture and hermetic leaps of faith.

It’s an approach that found a patron saint in the poet Bill Knott (1940-2014), who remained polarizing across decades of a singular literary career. He lobbed disruptive game-changing ideas into the American poetry community, while moving further and further off the grid. The effect was of digging one’s heels in so far they stick out the other side. By warping contemporary views of authorship and the tenuous state of publishing to his own ends, Knott pioneered confessional transparency, fearless of oversharing.

With Knott and The Lorax as spirit animals, these works together might suggest an ethereal register of protest, at which one could speak on issues too abstract to gain their footing in a larger dialogue. They could be ideas too far in the future or not widely understood enough, waiting on a dedicated few to translate. This goes for art, technology, the natural world, and all combinations thereof. For example, we continue fetishizing speed, so why not get equally high off stillness? Neither is any more intellectually rigorous than the other. Not to mention both waste labor, resources, and time. The sun also rises on a global, virtual city that, while evolving exponentially, feels it doesn’t need to sleep. Hopefully, throughout The Lorax Poems, expertise emboldens impulse, overflowing into strategies of note to those who would ‘speak for the trees.’” -Zach Smith

Jonathan Basile: Fictional Archives, Archival Fictions

Friday September 11th, 8—10pm

A lecture and discussion exploring the online universal library, libraryofbabel.info

ONE NIGHT ONLY — libraryofbabel.info is a virtual recreation of an idea that has inspired philosophers and poets from the Ancient Greek Atomists to Jorge Luis Borges. By permuting a complete set of letters and punctuation, one can arrive at every possible utterance, including past and future literary masterpieces and day to day conversations. We will gather to consider together how the concepts of presence and absence, invention and discovery, and novelty and repetition can be undermined by the universal library, and how any archive can exist without physical form, embedded in the essence of language.

Jonathan Basile is a fiction writer, philosopher, and computer programmer. He created an online universal library (https://libraryofbabel.info/) and universal image archive (https://babelia.libraryofbabel.info/). He has written about his work in Flavorwire (http://flavorwire.com/515783/brooklyn-author-recreates-borges-library-of-babel-as-infinite-website) and The Paris Review Daily (http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2015/07/23/the-library-of-babel-as-seen-from-within/).

Video Stills from Untitled (green), by Samantha Harmon


Good Work Gallery is pleased to present the exhibition and book launch for  “This Dog Needs A Name”, a group exhibition and book organized by Kerry Cox and featuring works by:

Anna Adler
Caitlin Baucom
Courtney Childress
Erin Marie Dunne
Samantha Harmon
Dominique Hurth
Honey McMoney
Reuben Lorch Miller
Adam Pape
Ryann Slauson
Erin Sweeny
THERE THERE
& Frank Traynor

Book featuring works and essays by:

Anna Adler
Caitlin Baucom
Christiana Cefalu
Courtney Childress
Kerry Cox
Erin Marie Dunne
Daniel Esparza
Samantha Harmon
Dominique Hurth
Honey McMoney
Edgar Meza
Reuben Lorch Miller
Adam Pape
Ryann Slauson
Erin Sweeny
THERE THERE
& Frank Traynor

Opening Saturday July 18:
Performances by Honey McMoney and Anna Adler

Screening of Sam Harmon’s Untitled (green)

Closing Saturday August 8:
Performance by Caitlin Baucom

“This Dog Needs A Name” is the first in a series of annual or semi annual exhibitions called the “Notebook Series” that is also a book. Assuming the role of artist as curator, I am tracing common interests across a group of friends and acquaintances. The artists and writers included here often use fictitious elements to create non-fictitious narratives, or glean elements from non-fiction to create fictions. They are interested in character development through objects and use elements of surreality to bring us into commonplace themes. Also, this show is based on the following story.

One warm night a few weeks ago some friends and I found a dog in Bed Stuy. She had no collar but was well groomed and a nice guy from the neighborhood was feeding her canned food on paper plate. For the next twelve hours, this dog was all we could talk about. We had no idea where she came from but we wanted to make sure she was taken care of. We began to refer to her as “Choochi”, after Socrates Bueno, the Lower East Side Barber. That night, a kid decided to take her home to see if he could keep her, or until we could figure out something more permanent. In the morning, he told us his mom wouldn’t let him keep her. He had decided to sell her for $150. It took ten minutes. We never even knew her name.

Like Choochi, all the works in this show are the product of a narrative that may be real or imagined. In Samantha Harmon’s video “Untitled (green)”, Harmon portrays a hedge fund manager who laments not becoming an artist. In this confessional video portrait, Harmon’s character matches her clothing to money and tells us about her ideas for art projects. In works from his photo series “Blunts and Skunks” Adam Pape fixes his lens on the nighttime life of Dyckman Park in Inwood creating an eerie Lynchian documentary photo series. In Ryann Slauson’s sculpture “Preservation”, a paper mache bicycle wheel hangs from a branch, a scene of a possible suburban melodrama or the result of an abandoned petit theft.

The “This Dog Needs A Name” book features collaborations between artists and writers whose work has similar connective tissue. It serves as a sort of expanded exhibition catalog and independent work of print in its own write. It is produced by EAT editions in an edition of 50 and available for sale, here.

- Kerry Lynn Kox, 2015

The Sorcerer/Apprentice

June 5th, 7-10pm

In conjunction with Bushwick Open Studios

Good Work Gallery is pleased to present “The Sorcerer/Apprentice”, an exhibition of works by Karl Gitter, Scott Goodman, and Joshua Caleb Weibley.

It was in the summer of 2011 that Scott Goodman was first contracted to produce vinyl signage for the German painter and conceptualist Karl Gitter. The size of the job necessitated bringing in additional hands and Goodman reached out to Joshua Caleb Weibley, with whom he had done similar work in the past. They completed the installation—to Gitter’s great satisfaction—ahead of schedule and under budget. The gallery in Chelsea where the three first met would move several times that year before ultimately closing in the end of 2012, but Goodman and Weibley have maintained a relationship with Gitter over the years since, nonetheless.

Now in his late 60s, Gitter is of roughly the same generation as Goodman and Weibley’s parents but is lesser known in America than he is abroad. Likewise, he claims not to have heard of any of the American conceptualists whose work his most closely resembles (Sol LeWitt being a fair comparison), citing instead László Moholy-Nagy or Blinky Palermo and Imi Knoebel (with whom he was acquainted during brief study at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf). Recognizing Gitter’s influence on their work, Goodman and Weibley are pleased he has allowed them to present his work for the first time in Brooklyn alongside their own.

The slash in the resulting exhibition’s title, “The Sorcerer/Apprentice”, confuses the relationship of light mentorship Gitter, Goodman and Weibley have shared while evoking a magical animation of inert domestic materials (referring, as it does, to Goethe’s “Der Zauberlehrling”, popularly known worldwide by its 1940 Walt Disney adaptation).

Scott Goodman’s prop-like paintings demarcate domestic space using flat, graphic shapes and colors that produce a paradoxical illusionistic sensation swinging back and forth between something less than real and hyperreal. The archway he has created for this exhibition suggests an aperture opened inward beyond the wall it hangs on into an apartment complex.

Karl Gitter’s work in scrawled notes and labored but precise drawings asks to be considered in terms of shifts in scale from an interior domestic setting outward. His small drawings are native to the space of a writing desk set by a window (perhaps even just inside the one Goodman has made) but they are patiently sketched out with the intention of being executed by others elsewhere. For this exhibition Goodman and Weibley will execute one of his works in the medium that first brought the three of them into contact with each other and have prepared a vinyl window mural to his specifications. Also on view will be a selection of his drawings including those directing the mural’s creation.

Joshua Caleb Weibley’s solitaire works hold to the scale Gitter’s work first emerges at and more directly (if humorously) illustrate the shuffling of papers involved in such work “coming into play” as finished pieces for consideration. The work begins in drawing at a desk before being submitted to further production processes and arranged for display, suggesting that creation and reception of art can be, each in their own way, two very separate and somewhat solitary activities.

1100 Broadway is open for Bushwick open studios

NEW WORK BY: Emily Collins, Scott Goodman, Phyllis Ma, Maren Miller, Alex Phillips, Saki Sato, Clay Schiff, Matt Taber, and Faren Ziello.

OPEN:
Friday, June 5th, 7-10pm
Saturday, June 6th, 12pm-6pm
Sunday, June 7th, 12pm-6pm

Sponsored by: Pabst Blue Ribbon

Catherine Pearson: A Feeling

Book Launch and Exhibition

May 2 – May 22, 2015
Opening reception Saturday, May 2nd, 6-9pm.

Good Work Gallery is pleased to present the book launch of A Feeling by Catherine Pearson and an exhibition of her most recent paintings. A Feeling uses collage, photography, and watercolor with an immediacy and intimacy which contrasts and complements her more labor-intensive large scale work. The book provides both a context and a key to her approach to abstraction: content as a glimpse, as a feeling grasped. Pearson graduated from Cooper Union in 2010.

Master & Lingo - New Sculpture by Maren Miller & Saki Sato 

Opening this Saturday, March 21, 6 -9 PM