SIX FEATURES
29 May - 1 August, 2014
Robert Miller Gallery is pleased to present Six Features, with distinct presentation featuring the contemporary artists E.V. Day, Dahlia Elsayed, Rishad Mistri, Todd Pavlisko, Ryan Roa, and Jude Tallichet.
E.V. Day's presentation includes unique embossings on paper produced during her Lab-Grant residency at Dieu Donné Papermill in New York. Day uses fishnet body-stockings as a printmaking tool by stretching them on a frame into layered compositions that suggest moments of transformation and escape. Also on view at Robert Miller is her large-scale sculpture called Bandage Dress, in which an iconic Hervé Léger dress is deconstructed, its elastic straps stretched and suspended using chains to create an entirely new form. Describing her own works as "futurist abstract paintings in three dimensions," she manipulates imagery from pop culture to alter social stereotypes and playfully illuminate contradictions of gender roles.
Dahlia Elsayed creates paintings, paper works, and installation that are informed by language and environment. Using a verse as a starting point of each work, Elsayed visually simulates poetic structure of pauses, line breaks, and stanzas. Her installation at Robert Miller, called Turn of Phrase, constructs a personal and collective sense of place. The hard edges and bold, bright colors evoke its association with construction signage and barriers, thereby engaging the pre-existing surroundings, such as the scaffolding and orange signage that fade into familiarity in the Chelsea neighborhood.
Rishad Mistri's photography focuses on subject matter encountered in daily life. His objective is to evoke the rasa, a concept in Indian aesthetic theory that suggests there is an essential element in any visual, literary, or performing art work that can only be suggested, not described. The non-material essence, rasa is the dialogue created between an effective presentation of art in any form and the participating spectator.
Todd Pavlisko's works on canvas frequently obscure the delineation between two- and three-dimensionality. UNTITLED, OOF, which acts as a backdrop to his conceptual installation, comprises the repurposing of thousands of yellow plastic retail tag fasteners to a natural canvas. Deriving inspiration from Ed Ruscha’s OOF (1963), an oil on canvas painting, he mines art history to re-contextualize language and image. For this presentation, Pavlisko exhibits works that visually translate the artist’s fascination with materials, particularly with the ways in which he can defy their limitations and address the greater notion of pressure.
Ryan Roa's site-responsive installation at Robert Miller comprises black rubber bungee cords and hardware that spring from the walls and ceiling. The forms change as viewer moves around the physical gallery space, presenting multiple perspectives and interactions with the objects. The tension that is inherent to the materials and the physicality of the work evoke a range of associations, such as inner angst, rage, and endangerment. Roa's drawings explore multiple perspectives in a two-dimensional format and convey the artist's experimentation with mathematical fractions to arrive at new and unexpected visual outcomes.
Jude Tallichet produced Abandoned Clothes, a large series of sculptures in bronze and cast stone, over the past five years. Each element is a different piece of clothing frozen in the moment it was discarded on the floor. Collectively displayed, the pieces invent the sense of a bygone moment that involved a roomful of participants, implying rapture, a disaster, or an inexplicable event. Her brightly enameled Advanced Mind Power is an adapted mimetic image from the movie poster for Hitchcock's masterpiece Vertigo. It presents another kind of challenge to our desire to "know" and to understand sculpture in a glance.