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proxy gallery

2016

Proxy Gallery is happy to host a work by Cindy Bernard from her new series, Your Personal View of (Social) Nudism.

In the series, Bernard works with images from magazines promoting a nudist lifestyle, many of which feature articles on the morality of nudism, the etiquette of taking photographs in nudist parks, court cases on censorship and the mail and the qualities of a good nudist picture.

The photograph that covers the entire back ‘wall’ of the gallery is from a 1960 issue of Eden Annual. On the photograph Bernard has drawn a grid in graphite, based on the film format of the camera depicted; moreover, since the grid is drawn in front of the photograph, it functions somewhat like the ground glass of the large format camera, positioning the viewer as the photographer and sending the image behind the glass, into an imagined space, in turn making visible the very process of photographing and activating the Proxy Gallery itself as a camera.

Removed from the magazine cover, thus decontextualized, the photograph calls attention to the position of the viewer and also the absent/present position of the photographer, possibly disrobed in order to photograph in a nudist camp. What it also underscores is the role of photography in the propagation of nudism as a wholesome natural lifestyle, devoid of “prurient” voyeurism. In this case, the female gaze of the photographer in the picture is “seeing” both the back of the woman in the foreground, and the photographer shooting the scene, and by extension us, the viewers, perhaps denuding us as well and including us into the triangle of gazes. Beyond the isolation from the original context, this "box that stands for a gallery” modifies the signification of the image in ways critical and discursive.

Cindy Bernard

FEBRUARY 1 - 29, 2016

With Rooms by the Sea, Texas-based artist Candace Hicks has selected to use the illusionistic qualities offered by the Proxy Gallery, and employ the box as a theatrical stage: A room contains another room that seems to be a barge, bouncing on the seawater. The title sends us to fantasies of dreamy vacations, but in fact the installation is based on the well-known painting by Edward Hopper Rooms by the Sea a print of which was available for rent during the artist’s childhood.

The scene is interpreted by most viewers as evocative of solitude and isolation, but Hicks’ work could also be seen as the subtlest of the surreal with its wall of water that fills the open doorway. Hicks’ three-dimensional and mobile installation reimagines the scenario as a dreamy suite of rooms set adrift on the sea with the vastness of the water contained in a small box. Fascinated by this immensity in miniature the viewer “enters” the room only to “exit” stage right, to the sea.

Candace Hicks

MARCH 1- 31, 2016
Opening Reception: Thurs. March 3, 6-9 pm

Proxy Paris présente l’exposition personnelle de l’artiste américain Roy Dowell a la Galerie Ygrec.

Le travail de Dowell est surnommé «petit arbre» en référence à un plus grand travail aujourd'hui exposé à Seattle. La forme d'arbre décoré en papier, carton et peinture acrylique effectue un certain nombre de fonctions d'une façon normalisée: La nature de la Galerie Proxy signifie que chaque sculpture a seulement une vue frontale. Néanmoins Dowell offre la possibilité que la sculpture peut être simplement tourné autour de son axe pour montrer l’ autre face. Ils sont à l'avant et à l'arrière, les côtés A et B, jour et nuit. Ici la peinture et la sculpture coexistent, la planéité et la tridimentionalité existent dans le même objet; la décoration et la construction, tige épaisse ou une base artistique, les matériaux et la forme vivent ensemble paisiblement et avec tension, la nervosité et la curiosité, complet et aussi ouvert.

Galerie Proxy est un projet (depuis 2013) de l'artiste americaine Annetta Kapon.

Roy Dowell

25 Mars 2016 – 23 Avril 2016

Just because Richard Amend makes abstractions it doesn’t mean they are not allowed to represent, to narrate, to express and to describe. This dazzling and shiny new work is both confident and tentative, continuing his long practice and also revisiting the origins of that practice, recasting it in the light of its own history and allowing itsef to be influenced by that history. His phantasmagorical Cubist Blues is, like much cubism, based on rotation and division of space.

The reflective surfaces in the installation recall the mirrors of the palace of Versailles and they also express the artist’s reflection (thought) on his own beginnings: that moment when the brain thickens but retains the liberating freshness of the beginner. The work is blue in color, it refers to musical Blues, it might also be sad, and it is not afraid to be fun-house flamboyant. Almost like the shutter of a SLR camera, one expects the petals to open and close, or to blink like eyelids. It creates the effect of an encounter between one eyeball and another.

Richard Amend

APRIL 1- 30, 2016
Opening Reception: Wed. April 6 from 6-8 pm

Whether you start looking from the back and move forward, or the front and then look behind, you will see in Ricos’ installation a photograph of a sunset (with people) “framed” and “framing” in four different ways: The Gallery hides the center of the photograph and its putative subject, the sun--thus the Gallery itself is framed by the large photo on the wall, printed on canvas. Inside the Gallery and on the back “wall” we have a smaller version of the photograph framed in a museum frame, with its own spectator in front. The small sunset is re-framed by the museum, and the spectator, and that picture itself is framed by the Proxy Gallery as an institution.

This raises the question of the mediating effect of a gallery or museum on our perception of a photograph. Do institutions, occlude, elevate or interpret on our behalf? The installation uses an intentionally banal subject matter to ask questions about the ontology of photography, the modulation of meaning, and ultimately the larger apparatus of image production and circulation.

Antonis Ricos

MAY 1- JUNE 30, 2016
Opening Reception: Wed. May 4, 6-8 pm

The scale model is the best representation of a concept, a stage between thought and realization, almost the perfect Platonic object. It is not a small copy of a pre-existing entity; it’s a real thing that aspires to another, ideal form.

Roger F. White’s sculpture Untitled (Great Planes) raises the question of scalability and anti site-specificity. Conceived as a maquette for a public art proposal in North Dakota, it is presented here as a sculpture-in-itself, liberated of its relation to local history, weather, structural integrity and institutional bureaucracy.

The work, in its white abstraction in a white cube, may have references to visionary architecture but here it takes on a new life not as a miniature but as a life-size object in the Proxy gallery. This “purely” esthetic and formal aspect allows the sculpture to interact with the gallery space suggesting the scalability or architectural status of the gallery itself.

Roger F. White

JULY 1- AUGUST 31, 2016
Closing Reception: Wed. Aug. 31, 6-8 pm

Bryant and Keading’s new installation is a complex organism that includes macrame, ceramics, fresh peppers, ginger and garlic, wood, the Proxy Gallery and sound equipment playing field recordings. The macramé does NOT have any Josephine knots, hence the title of the installation.

Bryant is known for her penchant for honoring things that have lost value and are easily overlooked. She taught herself to make macramé, envisioning it hanging outside the gallery, reducing Proxy to a convenient shelf to hold the “tail” of the macrame.

Keading’s CD player and speaker broadcast a loop of early morning urban and nature sounds that she recorded from her window from 5-6 am. Like Bryant’s macrame, these sounds of cars, horns, and birds are both personal (because of the early morning time) and public, pointing to what we don’t know and can’t know about one another or nature. This sound, together with the perishable vegetables, add an element of time and duration to the exhibition.

The white box of Proxy is activated, yet de-centered as most of the sculptural and aural elements exist outside of it. Instead of Proxy containing the work, the work contains the gallery.

Elizabeth Bryant &
Hilja Keading

SEPTEMBER 1 - 30, 2016
Opening Reception: Thurs. Sept. 8, 6-8 pm

Doodle box is an amalgamation of Zellen’s different aspects of her practice — drawing, photography and viewer interactivity. Proxy Gallery itself is transformed into both the content and the container of Zellen’s installation, a home-made ad-hoc stereo viewer. The image inside the box is seen in 3D when viewed through the red/blue stereo glasses attached to the box. The doodles on the outside of the box also vibrate when viewed through the glasses. The inside-outside dichotomy is explored as a metaphor for what goes on inside and outside the mind.

Zellen is known for her interactive and entertaining smartphone apps as well as her linear drawings that are strongly cartoony. They depict stylized figures in urban surroundings and create dense patterns over an entire surface. Here, the drawings cover the outside of the box in addition to filling the head of the girl in a photograph of a freestanding metal sculpture shot in Vancouver. The photograph of the sculpture-that-looks-like-a-drawing, when combined with the drawings, fuses inside and outside in countless ways.

Jody Zellen

OCTOBER 1 to 31, 2016
Opening Reception: Thurs. Oct. 6, 6-8 pm

The Five W’s Proxy Paris is a version of Silton’s 2008 work The Five W’s, trimmed to fit specifically in the Proxy Gallery. The work exists as endless copies that viewers are encouraged to take.

Stripes have a long history and complicated if contradictory symbolisms, and Silton has a long history of using stripes in her work, together with images or words. Her cards at first glance look merely like a series of horizontal black and white stripes, but when in motion, or from a distance, they reveal one of five words: WHO, WHAT, WHEN, WHERE, and WHY. These refer to the presumed hallmarks of journalistic accuracy, but also to ideas of critical questioning; of skepticism towards propaganda and lazy reasoning. This work is particularly pertinent in this charged election moment in the US, seeking clarity amid mis-and disinformation.

The stripes impede reading, or the words muddle the stripes; in either case, the viewer has to change positions in order to “get” the word, and, as in lenticular photography, perhaps that movement is an antidote to rigidity and stagnation.

As to the Proxy Gallery, Silton uses it as it was meant to be used: an institutional framework that allows meaning to be distributed and questioned.

Susan Silton

PROXY PARIS GALLERY
NOVEMBER 1 - DECEMBER 31, 2016
Opening Reception: Fri. Oct. 14, 6-9 PM

Wood, magnets, and iron dust are the components and also the title of Paris-based Véronique Joumard’s new project for Proxy Gallery. Strong, circular magnets are fixed to the outside of a wooden box. The magnets attract the iron dust placed inside, which gathers into bushy shapes like a desert landscape in miniature, formed by its own gravity.

Scientific and magical phenomena are closely connected with art and its ability to elicit wonder. Joumard’s work demystifies the magic by naming the exhibition by its own materials. The unique scale of the gallery also allows us to see both inside and outside the frame, revealing “how it is done.”

Veronique Joumard has a long history of using electricity, conductivity, lenses, mirrors, light and fire in her installations edging towards precariousness or even danger. In the case of magnets and iron dust, the work prompts associations to minimalist experiments and also the rich metaphorical connotations of words like enlightenment, attraction, repulsion, current and energy.

Veronique Joumard

NOVEMBER 1 - DECEMBER 31, 2016

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