FUGITIVE VISION

Image: Christopher Cozier, Development,

2003, 60” x 60,” ink, acrylic and charcoal on paper.

On view: June 9th – July 23, 2011

Opening Reception: June 9th, 6-8pm

Also on view: William Kentridge: Recent Linocuts

David Krut Projects is pleased to present Fugitive Vision, a group exhibition of works by Christiane Baumgartner, Christopher Cozier, Joseph Hart, Whitney McVeigh, Ryan and Trevor Oakes, Phil Sanders, Sara Sanders, and Mary Wafer.

The human eye continuously absorbs and categorizes an endless flow of visual information, encountering, simultaneously and unconsciously, objects in one’s path. We process this visual overload of masses, materials, and actions by forming connections between the external and ourselves. Our vision is always shifting, because the visible — as the Impressionists understood, and the Cubists later expanded upon — is by nature, fugitive, and cannot be understood from a fixed perspective. The works in this exhibition explore the frameworks that surround and influence this subjective vision. Highlighting the interplay between sight and site, “Fugitive Vision” investigates the relationship between visual modes of perception and representation.

Christiane Baumgartner’s new series of drawings explores nuance in color and line. Operating as optical marks that remain in motion without a fixed form, these drawings suggest presence despite the absence of a stable image. Departing from photographic references found in Baumgartner’s well-known woodcuts, these drawings investigate lines in-between sight and representation, offering an image in transition.

Christopher Cozier explores the confrontation between the sight of one’s body and the stratification of self, revealing embedded, prescribed notions of identity and masculinity. As a symbol of success and division, the rostrum appears in his drawings, in various configurations, exposing the hierarchy of cultural identity as a production of a game or contest. Unoccupied, the symbol of the rostrum becomes an uninhabitable platform that pervades the pictorial space, questioning the commensurability between culturally-coded sight and a predetermined place.

Joseph Hart, whose general oeuvre investigates the visual presentation of artworks within institutional contexts, here explores the visual construction of line itself. Using a heavy, active layer of graphite to render the space around the line, he inverses the negative space to positive. Emphasizing this area surrounding line, Hart reveals the unseen structure that establishes and grounds a visual mark.

Whitney McVeigh utilizes improvisational lines to explore the relationship between mark and image, allowing subjective perception to engage with her automatic gestures. Ryan and Trevor Oakes’s drawings use geometrical metaphors of line and shape to render the anatomy of bioptic vision, depicting landscapes of human sight. Sara Sanders, in her multiple-color photo-lithograph, activates the seat of an unoccupied, antique chair to act as a screen, evoking an instilled presence despite a physical absence. Mary Wafer’s prints reference the structure of the Abbottabad compound, using an architectural site as a substitute for an embedded portrait, while Phil Sanders employs site and place to investigate the inserted gaze of the explorer who redefines landscape as frontier.

Please contact Genevieve Lowe, Hannah Dumes or Kristyna Comer for more information.

Image: Christopher Cozier, Development, 2003, 60” x 60,” ink, acrylic and charcoal on paper.

David Krut Projects 526 W. 26^th St. #816, New York, New York, 10001; 212.255.3094; info@davidkrut.com, www.davidkrut.com