Corbett vs. Dempsey is delighted to present From Red Black to Black, from Blue Black to Black, a suite of new works by Josiah McElheny. This is the artist’s third solo exhibition with the gallery.
Here are some basic questions:
What happens when one form of energy is changed into another?
What shifts when a you expand the limits of the color spectrum?
What flash point is activated when a spectator is able to hear a color or see a sound?
In some ways, the answers all have to do with the interrelated triad of transduction, spectra, and synesthesia. These are basic science concepts, but they are also metaphors for the act of transformation. A way of representing fundamental change. Of imagining the mutable nature of objective reality and how that might represent our optimal collective futurity.
In From Red Black to Black, from Blue Black to Black, McElheny offers six extraordinary meditations on these questions. Four wall-hanging works incorporate embedded hand-blown vibrating glass discs that transduce and resonate sound signals. These “singing paintings” amplify musical works by David Grubbs that were especially commissioned for these pieces, as were all the sounds in the show. A combination floor- and wall-based sculptural installation stretches a red electrical cord around the interior of the space, transporting a heartbeat-like, non-repeating, non-metronomic signal from an analog “People’s Synthesizer” designed in 1972 to a tom-tom like cylindrical shell embedded with colored glass discs – vintage optical filters in a dazzling array of hues – the top of which transduces the synth sound by way of a white glass “drum head.” A major floor sculpture at the center of the exhibition is based on the Leslie speaker system best known from soul jazz organ groups; along with its spinning, doppler-effect inducing horn element, as in the case of the paintings its surface is marked with painted color spectra.
September 21 - November 4, 2023
In The Vault: Laika, 2021
4:33 min, HD video
"Some forms we can only know by their shadow. In homage to the spirits of space test dogs, or any being we use in the name of progress. This music video was made by invitation of composer Olivia Block for the release of her album Innocent Passage in the Territorial Sea (Room40)." – Deborah Stratman
September 21 - November 4, 2023
In the north gallery, Corbett vs. Dempsey is honored to present Gregg Bordowitz, Tetragrammaton, featuring a selection of recent monotypes. This is CvsD’s first exhibition with Bordowitz.
“The tetragrammaton is an ineffable, unpronounceable four-letter Hebrew word, the name of G-d in Judaism that spells creation into existence daily,” says Bordowitz. “It is never uttered and appears only in written form.” In these monotypes, Bordowitz concentrates on the letters of the tetragrammaton: yodh, he, vav, and he. Writing them over and over, every line drawn from a shape in one of the letters – an action determined by a numerological system – he arrived at a series of abstractions, dense, energetic and evocative, each one unique. He describes the prints as concrete poems. “They come out of an abiding interest in contemporary visual poetry and also a centuries-old meditational practice of rearranging the letters in one’s mind.”
Renowned as an activist artist, writer, and teacher, best known for his video and performance works, Bordowitz began his artistic life four decades ago as a painter. The Tetragrammaton prints are a return to working in 2-D visual media, evolving organically out of an active drawing practice that he formalized in this extensive body of printworks. In preparation for an exhibition at the University of Buffalo Art Galleries in 2021, Bordowitz began working with master printmaker Marina Ancona at 10 Grand Press in Brooklyn. He initially experimented with images in gray scale, then purple, eventually other colors, and expressing a desire to work with a “rainbow roll” in honor of Pride Day, he instigated a subseries using the color spectrum of the non-binary flag. “In Jewish mystical traditions, G-d has both masculine and feminine sides and is not anthropomorphized, in fact not depicted at all, so is all genders and no gender.”
September 21 - November 4, 2023
Friday & Saturday: 10-5
Sunday: closed
