Structure and Imagery: Drinks Night at SFA Projects

Installation view of Non-Place: Levan Mindiashvili and Grant Wells

Had a great time last evening at SFA Projects' Drinks Night!

Gallery co-owners, Keith Schweitzer and artist Kay Sirikul Pattachote, hosted the lively event in conjunction with the spaces' current exhibit, Non-Place that features the work of Levan Mindiashvili and Grant Wells.

The event offered a great chance to meet the artists and discuss their work in an informal setting that included a complimentary bar.

From the gallery's press release:

The title of the show borrows a phrase coined by Marc Augé to refer to spaces where concerns of relations, history, and identity are erased.

Mindiashvili’s practice explores the transitional, liquid state of historically accepted social forms and paradigms. Focused on in-between, transient conditions, his work itself can be placed in interstices between sculpture, drawing, tapestry, and painting. Hand-produced pigmented hydrocal sculptures visually and superficially mimic found concrete remnants from construction or archaeological sites and become the surfaces for charcoal drawings and paintings; they comment on the fragility of the sense of place and the ever-expanding virtualization of the image in current society. Hand-altered, jacquard woven tapestries explore possibilities of the work to exist fluidly in various physical bodies from sculpture or a painting being translated into the textile and sometimes back into three dimensional objects. (Jacquard, a semi-computerized loom, operates with digital files, thus actual weaving is done by hand, where each weave responds to one pixel). Being conceived as individual pieces, his works are interconnected in deep dialogue with each other, creating one whole – yet temporary – setting, that could be rearranged and reformulated for each new presentation.

Wells sources his imagery from digital map applications, experiencing locations and space through a removed reality. Although maps are generally used as an informational tool, an excess of information creates a tension to keep searching for some point of reference while moving through this space. With the traditions of landscape photography and painting in mind, Wells is interested in the relationship to the ideas of depicting ones surroundings. However, his work deals with the removal of physicality from location and how this device changes our relationship to space. Through multiple layers of pigment transfers, Wells moves this imagery from his computer to canvas. As the image smears and breaks down, colors and forms merge together to further abstract the overall composition. By using this process, Wells creates a tension between the digital and physical realities, and a greater distance from actual locations.

The exhibit runs through September 30th.

SFA Projects
131 Chrystie Street
New York, NY