Not surprisingly, four of the exhibiting artists are represented by On Stellar Rays, a burgeoning Lower East Side gallery that is itself a laboratory for aesthetic experimentation. Candice Madey opened On Stellar Rays when the economic recession began to breach. While the New York art scene sat on a deathwatch, Madey initiated a series of vigorously demanding yet elegantly executed exhibitions and performances. Although the work she shows is often challenging, each piece is capable of relating to audiences on what Madey describes as “a human level.” Through craftsmanship, technique, intellectual rigor and raw, enigmatic allure, the exhibitions prove that possessing a formal education or art world exposure is no substitute for an open mind. “The artists are extraordinary. I believe so unconditionally in the work,“ she confided, “It doesn’t work if we don’t trust.”

With this philosophy, On Stellar Rays appeals less to the mere collector than to patrons who similarly desire expanding the realm of aesthetic possibility. “You can either allow yourself to be informed by something, receive and experience a work,” Madey explained, or “try to bring to it and think how it can relate to what [you] already know. I’m more interested in the first person and I want work that is informing.” Allowing exhibitions to evolve unrestrained, the gallery is a haven for its accomplished artists to germinate more projects, dialogues, and opportunities. And for the “Greater New York” curators, opportunity for unfathomed art forms is an indication of New York’s finest.

Debo Eilers
Debo Eilers’ powerful visual language awakens the most insipid surroundings. In digital prints and mixed-media assemblages, lime, fuchsia and banana yellow stripes and stencils parade over generic found-objects or computer screenshots. Bisecting lines and cuts in canvasses disorient the viewer while his accosting color pallet confronts the banal imagery with humor and purpose. Whether working to emasculate corporate culture or taunt the pedagogy, his performances emit an equally electric energy. In 4 Hour Fundamental (2009) the artist managed to reference Valentine de Saint-Point’s Manifesto of Lust, Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory, Keith Haring and Lawrence Weiner, all the while dripping with day-glow paint. For “Greater New York,” Eilers plans to turn his exhibition space into a sculpture and performance studio: a spectacle impossible to miss.

Zipora Fried
Endurance is fundamental to Zipora Fried’s process. Regardless of medium, it is also the lasting emotional effect of her exquisitely crafted work. Her large-scale drawings are slathered in meditative yet obsessively exhaustive markings. In the sculpture Chère Maman (2007,) Fried burdens a dinner table by attaching hoards of bottles like suckling piglets hanging to its underside. Telling characteristics of portrait subjects endure despite obstructions, such as the huge chrysanthemum blocking the face of the tattooed, R.H. (2009.) Even her use of sound and language deals with intangibles, persistence, and negated function. In addition to a selection of sculptures and photographs, Fried’s contribution to “Greater New York” will include a filmed performance depicting the creation and climatic destruction of a glass bottle grotto. Solitary, laborious, fragile and violent, the scene is a psychic exploration of the artist’s cardinal motifs.

Tommy Hartung
Tommy Hartung’s The Ascent of Man (2009) combines stop-motion animation with footage from a 1973 BBC documentary on the evolution of humans. In contrast to typically chauvinistic justifications for our position in the world, his elusive imagery describes a poetic yet inglorious evolutionary path. Fluttering reproductions of classic paintings, puppets tied to mechanical contraptions and a snail dropping from the worn sole of a floating shoe depict a clumsy and artificial existence. Hell-bent on dominating our environment, our species is also shown as vulnerable and crippled by desire. Unraveling the threads of anthropology, The Ascent of Man exposes history, and perhaps life itself, as a manipulated but beautifully mysterious construct.

Maria Petschnig
Feminists often struggle against firmly established cinematographic devices to arrive at their own visions of the female body, its innocence and its sexuality. Wanting a more direct medium through which to address issues of public perception and private confession, Maria Petschnig recently abandoned painting to focus on performance and video art. Intermingling old, Super-8 family videos (shot by her father,) with footage of her adult body performing for the camera, Petschnig presents the act of performance as both a violation and the means to liberation. Catholic iconography and images of her twin sister further complicate the viewers’ associations with the objectified body. Rearranging familiar images of ritual, fantasy and manipulation, Petschnig’s work is as expressive as it is authentic.

Gallery Info : On Stellar Rays 133 Orchard Street, New York, NY 10002, www.onstellarrays.com


Portrait by: Bryce Pincham
All Other Images: Courtesy of On Stellar Ray

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