I LOVE YOU

TODD PAVLISKO

 

Now extended through 30 May 2015

 

I Love You, a solo exhibition featuring Todd Pavlisko, comprises new sculptures, works on paper, and installation.

 

On view for the first time in New York will be an ambitious site-specific iteration of Pavlisko’s All The Money I Found In A Year, an installation comprising thousands of gold-plated currency that the artist collected over the last ten years. Picking up the discarded coins from the street, floors of cab cars, and similarly incidental places, the artist reassigns value to the unheeded spare change by plating them in 24-karat gold. Adorning the main gallery’s monolithic wall, a glimmering mass of eight-and-a-half by thirty-two feet, the work’s conceptual undertones encourage us to reconsider our ideas about excess.

 

Pavlisko frequently addresses themes revolving around commodity and value by playfully drawing attention to iconicity and absurdity within a commercially driven art world. For his new series Untitled Autograph of rare baseball cards, he solicited autographs from personally inspirational figures  – artists, theorists, friends, and family. Visually the permanent ink signatures suggest collecting and idolization, of having heroes and feeling close to them. However, the autograph, not belonging to the pictured athlete, essentially negates the monetary worth of the otherwise valuable collectable item. Pavlisko intentionally challenges our preconceptions of what constitutes fine art by selecting traditionally non-art items and presenting them in unexpected ways. 

 

His series of works comprising pencil and gold-leaf serigraphy on paper present earnest drawings of 20th century culturally significant figures who each committed suicide, as well as re-contextualized scenes from Jean Luc Godard’s fatalistic and yet effervescent film A Bande à Part. The gold Gothic script reads at once as an epitaph and a love letter – they are the artist’s own ruminations on the authorship of a would-be suicide letter. Thematically parallel is Pavlisko’s latest series of sculptures composed of seemingly unrelated objects, including hand-carved violins that he contorts over tabletops, official ABA basketballs, 2-liter Orange Crush™ soda, and cast bronze gold-plated RayBan™ sunglasses. His approach is imbued with a deep sense of the personal. The oddity of this collection represents his reinterpretation of the traditional vanitas – an abstract, dark-humored self-portrait.

 

I Love You is the artist’s first solo exhibition in New York City and is organized in collaboration with Samsøñ Projects (Boston, MA).

 

Todd Pavlisko received his MFA in Interdisciplinary Art at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 2002. He was included in the 2013 Armory Focus: USA Centennial, curated by Eric Shiner, Director of the Andy Warhol Museum, and has had solo and group exhibitions at numerous institutions, including MoMA PS1; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Museum of Art and Design, New York; Cincinnati Art Museum; Bass Museum; and Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati and New Orleans; among others. His work is represented in both private and public collections, including the City of Naples; Museum of Fine Art, Boston; Museum of Art and Design, New York; Cincinnati Art Museum; the Dutch Consulate, and others. Todd Pavlisko was born in Cincinnati, Ohio and is based in New York City and Boston, where he is an Assistant Professor of Sculpture at Brandeis University.