September 5 - October 4, 2020

APPARATUS

Grayson Cox
Joan Waltemath

curated by A.V. Ryan

Opening reception: Saturday, Sept. 12, 5-8pm.

This exhibition brings together recent sculptures by Grayson Cox and early works on mylar by Joan Waltemath, on view in the US for the first time.

Grayson Cox’s Market Graph II (2020) fuses the metrics of our current crises — covid cases, unemployment figures and market profiteering — into a large-scale relational sculpture.  Greed and grief, isolation and economic ruin reduced to line and number populate our newsfeeds. Cox projects the graph as a fever-red interface for the body. Eleven feet long and16 inches wide, Market Graph rises to over 5 and a half feet and falls to table-height, just right to lean your elbow on. His newest works include floor paintings of the blue and white Amazon Prime bubble wrap mailers and a flurry of iced coffee cups — beguiling yet pointed indices of upwardly mobile convenience, excess and waste. 

Joan Waltemath’s White Skins (2003) are spiritual indexical portals. Plotted on softly translucent mylar and burnished in colored pencil, the largest units in these arrays of squares, bands and rectangles recede. What is smallest is nearest; at times they seem to float towards us. Taking her inspiration from reverse perspective — used by icon painters to open a window to the divine — Waltemath’s grid matrix has structured her work for the past twenty-five years. These drawings are some of Waltemath’s earliest attempts, using that matrix, to explore her experiences with Lakota spiritual ceremonies. While the initial impression is one of architectural drawings, slowly they offer breathing room. The drawings are accompanied by Waltemath’s nighttime recordings of the prairie in her native Nebraska.

This exhibition takes its cue from Giorgio Agamben’s essay, What is an Apparatus? Agamben urges us to intervene in the power structures and forms of knowledge that delimit our possibilities — especially now as we are being shaped by new forms of surveillance and control. To intervene is to not only to uncover a degree of freedom in ourselves but also, he argues, the pre-condition for rebuilding community. This exhibition stages its own apparatus to reflect on these matters.  With performances by Simone Kearney & Joan Waltemath, Hollis Witherspoon, AV Ryan & Joan Waltemath and other guests:

Thursday, Sep. 24, 5:30 - 7pm : “Universal Language”: Video screening and performance capturing emotional language during isolation by Hollis Witherspoon.

Saturday, Sep. 26, 4pm: “Epiphany with Husserl”: Conversation with Joan Waltemath and AV Ryan.
Please RSVP here.

Sunday, Oct. 4, 4pm: Performance: Text by Simone Kearney and Joan Waltemath on the squeeze box.
Please RSVP here.

Social Distancing: 20 people will be allowed in the space at a time.
For the Saturday, Sept. 26 talk and the Saturday, Oct. 4th, please rsvp by clicking ont the links provided above. The Thursday, Sept. 24 screening takes the form of an 11 minute video on loop, so that it is easy for the public to stay a limited amount of time in the gallery. There is plenty of room on our sidewalk to hang out and chat.

About the Artists:

Grayson Cox is a New York City based artist working in a variety of media, including painting, printmaking, photography and furniture-like sculpture. Grayson received his Masters of Fine Art from Columbia University in 2010. Grayson is the recipient of the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation Artistic innovation and collaboration grant, National Society of Arts & Letters Career Award, and the Daisy Soros Prize. He has exhibited in New York and internationally including the Center for Contemporary Art, Warsaw, Poland; Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Tel Aviv, Israel; The School of the Art Institute of Chicago; The New Museum; The Fisher Landau Center for Art, and the Sculpture Center in Queens, NY. 

Joan Waltemath grew up on the Great Plains. Her abstract paintings focus on constructing spatial voids using harmonic progressions and non-traditional, reflective pigments in oils as well as drawings in diverse materials. She has exhibited widely nationally and internationally, and her work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the National Gallery of Art and the Harvard University, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Musee des Beaux Arts, La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland. She was awarded the Jacob Lawrence Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2018. She is the Director of the Leroy E. Hoffberger School of Painting at the Maryland Institute / College of Art.

Gallery Hours:

Thursday - Sunday, 1 - 6pm, or by appointment. Please email hanne@fivemyles.org, or call 718-783-4438.
Please wear a facemask to visit the gallery. Visitors without masks cannot be let inside. Thank you for your cooperation.

DIRECTIONS:

Take 2, 3, or 4 trains to Franklin Avenue. Walk two blocks against the traffic on Franklin. Walk ¾ block to 558 St. Johns Place. FiveMyles is within easy walking distance from the Brooklyn Museum.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS:

FiveMyles is in part supported by the New York State Council for the Arts, Public Funds from the New York City Dept. of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, Council Member Laurie Cumbo, the Greenwich Collection, The Jacques and Natasha Gelman Foundation, the Shelley and Donald Rubin Foundation, and the Wolf Kahn and Emily Mason Foundation.