Second Gallery is pleased to present our inaugural exhibition, We Made It featuring works by Diane Carr, Brendan Harman, Michael Mahalchick, Frankie Martin, Andy Meerow, Paperrad, and Ezra Rubin, opening on Saturday January 28th, 2006, from 6 to 9 pm. We Made It is a high-energy collection of installations, sculptures, and videos that are built from the bottom up: bold home-made explorations of the imaginary, technology, pop culture, and nostalgia. The work in this exhibition inhabits the intersections between high and low culture, the polished and the the haphazard, darkness and colorful naiveté.
Paperrad, a collective consisting of Ben Jones, Jacob Ciocci, and Jessica Ciocci represented by Foxy Production, is internationally acclaimed for its videos, installations, performances, and comics, and has exhibited at the 2004 Liverpool Biennial,The Whitney Museum of American Art, Deitch Projects, Pace Wildenstein, and many other spaces. These densely saturated explorations into video games, cartoons, childhood nostalgia, and pop culture produce a layered and complex aesthetic stance on creativity and technology in the 21st century.
Fall Line by Michael Mahalchick of Canada Gallery consists of clothing condensed and strapped into the spaces between the gallery's rafters. This work entices the viewer into engaging with the hidden spaces directly above our heads while it examines the classic forms of line and color in relation to the body and architecture. Similarly, Brendan Harman's installation built of cardboard, wood, plastic bags, and synthetic fog creates a fantastical layered structure akin to a wishing well descending into a large rectangular hole in the gallery floor, such that the work is literally inside the floor.
Approaching the theme of building both in its content and the uniqueness of its medium, Ezra Rubin's The Collapsible Stone Wall is a JPEG slide-show in which the images fade from one to the next, resulting in a minute-long looped animation. This animation was created using an image of a stone wall found on Google Image Search for use as a web page background. This stone wall pattern is torqued, distorted, and pulled back and forth in perspective, as it switches between being treated as a photo of a three dimensional stone wall and an abstract object moving through a computer generated fourth dimension, accompanied by a mystical soundscape of moving and scraping stones. Diane Carr's Yard is a delicately crafted neon garden made of felt and velcro, which engages the relationships between nature, gender, craft, and fantasy. Frankie Martin, widely recognized for her radical performance, video, and installation, contributes a music video by her collaborator and home-made pop-star Juiceboxxx, off his album Are You There God It's Me, Juiceboxxx. Andy Meerow's sculptures and paintings are made of simple castoff materials with which he creates archetypal objects that in their own facile and often humorous way combine aesthetics common to classic modern art, children's art, primitive work, and timeless spiritual forms. In this exhibition Meerow is concerned with dreams that are had and never remembered, depicting a mystical vortex where forgotten dreams may go. We Made It brings a number of nontraditional approaches to art-making, and object building: a dynamic representation of the type of experimental installation, video, sculpture, and performance that Second Gallery will exhibit.
We Made It will be on view from January 28th to March 10th, 2006, with an opening reception on Saturday January 28th from 6 to 9pm. Second Gallery is open Wednesday through Saturday from noon to 6pm, and by appointment. Second Gallery is located in The Distillery, at 516 East 2nd Street, Boston. For information call 617-413-9395 or email secondgallery@gmail.com. www.secondgallery.org