Catharine Clark Gallery now at 150 Minna Street, between 3rd and New Montgomery
Concurrent Solo Exhibitions:
Ray Beldner: The Word
Nina Katchadourian: A Fugitive, Some Maps, Cute Animals and a Shark
Dates: October 4 – November 15, 2008
Artist’s Reception and Book Signing: October 4, 4–6 pm
Panel Discussion: October 4, 3–4 pm: Mistakes Were Made: Ray Beldner, Charles Gute, and Nina Katchadourian discuss new projects with Marcia Tanner
Catharine Clark Gallery announces the concurrent solo exhibitions: The Word, new text-based work by Ray Beldner, and A Fugitive, Some Maps, Cute Animals and a Shark, video and mixed media projects by Nina Katchadourian. An opening reception for the artists is Saturday, 4 October , 4–6pm. In conjunction with the solo exhibits the gallery will host a book signing for the introduction of Charles Gute’s book Revisions and Queries, published by The Ice Plant. In this publication Gute, a conceptual artist and editor of art publications, presents more than 50 drawings that he developed from corrected
publisher’s proofs where his edits remain forming images and the originally authored texts are removed. The resulting works on paper resemble line drawings, choreographic markings, or musical notations. Prior to the opening, from 3–4pm, the gallery will host a panel discussion: Mistakes Were Made, with speakers Charles Gute, Nina Katchadourian, and Ray Beldner musing on the subject of mistakes as a source for their artistic practices. The panel will be moderated by independent curator and writer, Marcia Tanner. Ray Beldner’s The Word is a new body of sculptural/text based work. Much of the work in the exhibit originates from the artist’s personal challenge to make form from text. The sources for Beldner’s texts are found notes, advertisements, desperate
pleas on homeless signs, biblical quotes and the hate-talk heard on right wing talk radio shows. The language takes shape as life-size, gold-leafed figures, neon signs, collections of toy soldiers, and cast concrete blocks, among other things. Beldner astutely pairs the found text with a medium that is often incompatible with the message--visual non sequiturs that nonetheless uphold the meaning in the word. In The Word, the texts act as visual symbols and the forms allow the viewer to uncover the irony, hypocrisy, and absurdity of the message. Born in San Francisco, Beldner received a Bachelors of Fine Arts from the San Francisco Art Institute and a Masters of Fine Arts from MillsCollege. He is the recipient of grants from the California Arts Council, Creative Work Fund, Potrero Nuevo, and the Ruth Chenven Foundation. In 2009, his work will be included in
Inventing Marcel Duchamp: The Dynamics of Portraiture at the National Portrait Gallery, Washington D. C., Redesign: Transforming the Ordinary, Nevada Museum of Art, Reno, Nevada. Recently he has exhibited in Material Abuse at CliffordGallery, ColgateUniversity, Hamilton, NY, and in Greetings From the American Dream, RiversideArt Museum,
Riverside, CA. This is his third solo exhibition with Catharine Clark Gallery.
In A Fugitive, Some Maps, Cute Animals and a Shark, Nina Katchadourian explores the complex relationship between humans and animals, which is often fraught with our human projections and fantasies about creatures quite different from ourselves. The Continuum of Cute, for example, is a grouping of appropriated images of animals sourced from the Internet. Katchadourian has ranked, from left to right, and from cutest to most grotesque, the selected creatures’ ‘portraits’. A giant inter-species beauty contest, the project investigates both our individual and collective sense of the "cute" at the same time as it indulges the anthropomorphic qualities that are often embedded in our sense of the word. The Continuum of Cute originated as a web project for the inaugural exhibit, Unmonumental, at the New Museum, New York, in which the viewer could reorganize the pictures of the animals on an interactive website (http://rhizome.org/art/exhibition/montage/katchadourian/.). Katchadourian’s exhibit also features two video-based projects. Fugitive is a six-channel video installation with footage of an orangutan at the Washington DC zoo traveling across a high wire. Presented on six monitors arranged in a circle, the animal appears to move around the circle from TV set to TV set, stuck in a loop that neither the animal nor the viewer can escape. Mystic Shark is a single-channel video projection that was shot in a hotel room in Mystic, Connecticut where the artist dons a set of petrified shark teeth purchased at the MysticSeaportMuseum’s gift shop. Playing with the mythical viciousness of this particular creature, the shark we find here is insecure, aging, and incompetent, and elicits more sympathy than fear in the viewer. Katchadourian’s Geographic Pathologies from 1996 are on view for the first time in this exhibit. These rearranged paper maps explore the visual connections between geography and anatomy. The tumorous and misshapen geographic forms in these maps are both grotesque and familiar, and given the current backdrop of our climate crisis they also read as a distortion that could be the result of environmental abuse. Katchadourian holds a Bachelors of Art from BrownUniversity, a Masters of Fine Arts from University of California, San Diego, and is an alumnus of the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program. She lives and works in New York. Her recent retrospective exhibition Opener 11: Nina Katchadourian: All Forms of Attraction at The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and ArtGallery at Skidmore College was nominated for best monographic exhibition by the Association of International Art Critics. This is Katchadourian’s third solo exhibition with Catharine Clark Gallery.
