RICHARD BLOES’s objects generally appear as loosely assembled elements from store-bought self- assembly kits, woodshop scraps, and found performance props that are anachronistically punctuated with the hard edge and movement of a video. In actuality the objects are highly organized sequences of things and stuff that are manipulated by friends and family according to a script by the artist, who documents the action in real time on video.
As the artist noted: “Reading Chair For Don Quixote Reading is a 4.5 min video shot in one continuous take. It is meant to be shown as an installation (in company with the sculpture that was used to make it) or on a monitor (in portrait mode). The piece imagines Don Quixote’s reading chair as a place where actions are separated from the mind, perceptions only realizing themselves in a
crash of physical reality into the windmill. Or as a place where the long shadow of Cubism must be fought, where Cubism is the windmill monster to be attacked. Or where outdated modes/ technologies pile up every day like the old codes of knighthood. The piece is also a place of
interaction between the physical world, the electronic image world, and human motion (in the piece, all objects are moved by a crew of five people). On cut-out strips of typed paper, dangling like a fishing lure in front of a chair with no legs, are the titles of the books about knighthood that Don Quixote read too much of. Many of these books were burned, in the Cervantes’s novel, in an effort to keep Don Quixote sane. They formed the identity/delusions of the ‘knight of the sorrowful face.’”

Richard Bloes was born in Waterloo, Iowa and received an MFA
from the University of Iowa. This will be his seventh exhibition at Feature Inc. The installation was made possible with an Individual Artist Grant, Pollock-Krasner Foundation, Inc., with special thanks to: Charles Addotta, Joel Bacon, Caitlin Driscoll-Bloes, Robert Ingraham, Robert Schefman.

For many years, JENNIFER SIREY has been cultivating bacteria to produce some of the elements of her sculpture. Her most recent water-filled glass tanks are penetrated by bulbous hand-blown glass tubes and as well, irregularly divided up by angled sheets of bacterial growth. On one level the sculpture is a highly aestheticized formal abstraction and on another it is a gnarly investigation into the body. In these particular works, to create the angled sheets, Sirey fills the tank to a predetermined level with a mixture of her mother culture and wine or sake, then tilts the tank so that the surface of the liquid aligns to the armature of small monofilament loops attached to the glass. After a few days, the bacteria Acetobacter (the same bacteria used to convert wine into vinegar) begin to attach to the armature and soon form a skin on the liquid’s surface. Once the membrane reaches the desired thickness, the tank is carefully drained and replaced with water mixed and white vinegar to stabilize the environment. The final piece is alive but in a state of hibernation.

Sirey was born in Brooklyn, New York and received her BFA from the School of Visual Arts, New York, in 1990. This will be her second show at Feature Inc.

> Sirey exhibition images

Upfront hosts a BOBBIE OLIVER painting, Summer Triptych 1 (2012), which veils and reveals the mutability of its development and redevelopment.

Oliver studied at the Center for Creative Studies, Detroit, and St. Alban’s School of Art, England, and lives and works in New York City.

.> Oliver exhibition images

While these recent paintings by David Deutsch appear extremely different from those of the last 25 years, continuity can be seen in their combining of abstraction and representation, the perspective of surveillance or observation, and sense of the impending. With regard to his occasional but notable rotunda paintings, 16 or so painted between 1989 and 2003, the connection is most simply the figure within a container.

These recent paintings are transfers and as such are related to the painting process for David’s plywood paintings from the early 70s. They are painted in acrylic on plastic sheeting, allowed to dry, an appropriately sized canvas is primed with a medium, and the plastic sheeting is placed paint surface down onto the primed canvas, smoothed and let to set for a day or two and then peeled away. The painted image has been absorbed into the medium covered surface of the canvas and the pulled plastic is again clear. This reversal is a distancing process, a device similar to checking out the strength of a painting’s form by looking at it upside down or in a mirror, and as well allows a myriad of seams, creases, ridges, and distressed surfaces that occur during the printing process to undermine the expressionist brush work of the so called painting. These qualities lure us into inspecting the paint application and separate us from the subject matter. Yet once we enter the physical uncertainty of the materiality we find that this alternate universe is indeed embedded in the other.

sexual inuendo intended butt not limited to. its not just limited to sticking xxx things in dwn xxx there, its also abt up here where we are sticking !!! things inside ourselves and others 24/7. r willing and enormous capacity to deliver and receive. eyes, ears, nose and mouth are open, feeding and being fed. we r intimate with what we encounter and spew. what we put r attention on goes deep. perceiving is eating. let the right ones in.

this june's i want that inside of me grew out of last june's i am not monogamous i heart poetry. selection was made from differing perspectives, yet i consistently worked against title and chose suggestive over obvious, abstract over representational, quieter over noisy, multiplicity over simplistic, absorbing over pushy. and it had to be paper, it's more immediate, has less baggage, and is easier to eat than a painting, sculpture or a video. 15 artists, 1 work each, 7 guests, 8 feature regulars.

> exhibition Images

Evie Falci dazzles the upfront downtown style with her rhinestones on denim. She was born in Brooklyn, attended Maryland college of art, and currently lives in Brooklyn

> upfront image

Eat Out evolved out of David Shaw’s questions surrounding our relationship to nature, his ongoing interests in sculpture as furniture/furniture as sculpture and what he sees as the permeable interface between matter and consciousness.

Tree limbs stand to support a landscape which is a table top, which is a wood framed mirror that by reflecting doubles its holdings, some of which are functional tableware, some of which are sculpture, and all of which are hand-blown glass. The glass is clear, so discussions of boundaries, transparency, appearance, and disappearance bubble up, and the line between these glass entities and their reflections is a lesson in discernment. Ditto for the distinguishability between sculpture and functional tableware. Many of these tabletop objects have limbs, projections, or emissions that burst or shoot out from a central form into the surrounding space, part celebration, part aggression, and perhaps part an attempt at reproduction. As well there are tree limbs, which come up from under and break through the mirror tabletops and establish a presence in the sky above. When looking into the sculpture, especially while seated for a dinner party and comparatively colorful and animated by our drinking, chewing, swallowing, and talking, we have an opportunity to opt out of the narcissistic interest in our reflection and be reminded that despite our intrusive presence in this still and ghostly landscape, we are indeed an integrated part of it.

Upfront
JESSE BRANSFORD: Aqua/Sal (for David Shaw)

Jesse Bransford has been engaged in graphically interpreting and recontextualizing images and information from occult, esoteric, and alternative belief systems. Recently he has moved from the theoretical position of his works on paper to a more practical one of developing and performing rituals to effect change. Using a synthesis of several magical systems, Aqua/Sal is a site-specific installation and rectification ritual for the artist David Shaw and seeks to realign Shaw’s historical dissonance with water and the watery forces in his life. 

Jesse Bransford was born in Atlanta in 1972 and attended Parsons School of Design, NYC, for his BFA, 1996, New School for Social Research, NYC, for his BA, 1996, and Columbia University, NYC for his MFA, 2000. He began exhibiting with Feature Inc. in 1997, and currently lives and works in Brooklyn.

> upfront images