on view: February 22 –March 22, 2003
Opening reception: February 22, 5 –8pm

Remains of the Day

Susan Smith + Jim Osman

Curated by Lilly Wei

Paintings by Susan Smith and sculpture by Jim Osman.

The Remains of the Day is the title of Kazuo Ishiguro’s elegant, perfectly pitched 1989 novel of English manners and mores set in the postwar days of waning empire and unraveling social hierarchies. The filching occurred while looking at the books on my bookshelves. I liked the sound of it and thought the title, if not the book, had a direct bearing on this show and so I borrowed it. An image of the day as a dismantled, demolished house reduced to a small heap of odds and ends, trashy and precious, silky and rough came to mind. It was an image which I associated with the works of Susan Smith and Jim Osman. Smith calls herself a painter but makes what also looks like architectural objects-minimalist, quietly radiant, subtly mixed and matched-generated by what she selectively, serendipitously culls from city streets and construction sites.

Jim Osman’s sculptures, on the other hand, look more like architecture-scaled-down quizzical houses, windows, walls, fences-using what’s handy for starters but are also fastidiously painted and patterned in a sweetshop array of bright, toothsome pastels. What Smith and Osman have in common is that they refresh and refurbish remnants; they reconstruct formally and complicate the narrative - she as a kind of archaeologist, anthropologist, formalist, he as a bricoleur and builder. This is re-cycling as an art form, the practicing of residual rites, where remains are seeds and springboards and ongoing, part of FIveMyles’ series of exhibitions celebrating the architecture in art.

- Lilly Wei

Susan Smith has recently shown her paintings at the New York Studio School, the Times Square Gallery and the Renate Schroeder Gallery in Cologne.

Jim Osman has exhibited his work at P.S. 122 Gallery, Brooklyn Bridge Outdoors, Metaphor Contemporary Art and at the Bern Dibner Library at Brooklyn Polytechnic University.

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.