Galerie Hubert Winter curated by Allyson Spellacy
„Yamaska & Alexi-Meskhishvili“
www.galeriewinter.at
Curator(s):
New York based curator Allyson Spellacy has organized public art projects and events, presented and co-published exhibitions and interviews with multi-disciplinary artists - east and west - internationally for twenty years. In 2022 she produced Marcia Hafif: An Extended Gray Scale in Los Angeles.
Artist(s):
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Ketuta Alexi-Meskhishvili More
Ketuta Alexi-Meskhishvili is a Georgian-American artist living in Berlin. She studied at Bard College, Annandale, NY under Stephen Shore, An My Lee and Barbara Ess. Her work incorporates digital and analog photography in presentational and site specific undertakings. The multilayered process which Alexi-Meskhishvili employs is experimental and often intuitive, converging on a conceptual logic of choreography and stage-craft not just of emulsive surfaces, but the conditions of photographic representation overall.
Among recent institutional exhibitions are Kunsthalle Basel (Basel), Kölnischer Kunstverein (Cologne) and Les Rencontres d’Arles (Arles). Group exhibitions include Museum für Photographie Braunschweig (Braunschweig); Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (Paris); Kunst Haus (Vienna); FRAC Haute-Normandie, Sotteville-lès-Rouen (Sotteville-lès-Rouen); Kunstverein Hannover (Hannover;) and New Museum (New York), for the 2015 New Museum Triennial, among others. The artist is represented by Helena Anrather (New York), Molitor (Berlin) and Frank Elbaz (Paris).
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Carrie Yamaoka More
Carrie Yamaoka is a New York-based visual artist whose work spans painting, photography and sculpture. Yamaoka is interested in the topography of surfaces, materiality and process, the tactility of the barely visible and the chain of planned and chance incidents that determine the outcome of the object.
Carrie Yamaoka’s institutional exhibitions include the ICA (Philadelphia), MOMA/PS1 (New York), Palais de Tokyo (Paris), Centre Pompidou (Paris), Fondation Ricard (Paris), the Henry Art Gallery (Seattle), Artists Space (New York), the Wexner (Columbus), Leslie Lohman Museum (New York), Victoria and Albert Museum (London) and MassMOCA (Massachusetts) . Published articles on the artist have appeared in the New York Times, Artforum, Art in America, Artnews, The New Yorker, Time Out/NY, Hyperallergic, Interview and Bomb. Carrie Yamaoka is included in the collections of the Albright-Knox, the Art Institute of Chicago, Dallas Museum of Art, Henry Art Gallery, and Centre Pompidou. She is the recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship and an Anonymous Was A Woman award. Yamaoka is represented by Ulterior (New York) Commonwealth and Council (Los Angeles/Mexico City). She is a founding member of the queer art activist collective fierce pussy (https://fiercepussy.org).
Exhibition text
More
The two artists introduced here for the festival at Galerie Hubert Winter this September—Ketuta Alexi-Meskhishvili and Carrie Yamaoka—use painting-adjacent processes towards photographic ends … or is it a photographic protocol conjuring painterly results? Borderline indeed (as Maximilian Geymüller states in his “Curated by …” proposal). Carrie Yamaoka’s astute observation of the pairing with Ketuta Alexi-Meskhishvili was that it is “photography-proximate.” Forging (but not forcing) a dialogue between two artists who explore pictorial phenomenology through photography, painting, sculpture and installation invites a meaningful and complex exchange, much like the active strategies Yamaoka and Alexi-Meskhishvili apply—printing, peeling, playing—with tone (mass and half), drone (reverb and cerebral) and hefty with impulsive, nimble, formal attitude. Mass Tone.
Ketuta Alexi-Meskhishvili draws on the world around her, at the studio, at home, on the road, splitting her time between Berlin and Tbilisi. Images are captured, conveyed and layered using both analogue and digital devices, generating uncropped C-types, pigment prints and transparent cotton voile (“veils” to use the artist’s term) from a 4 x 5 negative. Recycled motifs appear throughout—friends, family, patterns, streetscapes—Alexi-Meskhishvili, who identifies as a photographer, manages a stagecraft that presents as an environmental choreography.
Carrie Yamaoka, presses her “negative”—a transparent pressure sensitive material—directly onto the wall; at times she pours her “film” (resin with dry pigment) into a mold; often Yamaoka layers unexpected, industrial materials (vinyl, mylar, bubble wrap) to achieve reflective, absorbing, mysterious overlays that transmit a sense of the duration of a process undertaken luring a viewer into prolonged contact. It is not subterfuge, per se, it is temporal photomechanical reproduction in its rawest form. Yamaoka’s surfaces appear to “crawl” (in her words), to illuminate, to chorus, with space and one another.
Samuel Beckett wrote “to restore silence is the role of objects.” What is the matter that can bring peace back? Silence is not the same as quiet, it is not passive. Is it losing oneself in a practice that is systematic and intuitive at the same time? Is it when we drop reception, when an afterimage comes into focus, or sees itself degenerating into a patina; the impression of a breath on emulsion, or thumb print into setting gel? The exhibition at Galerie Hubert Winter offers an opportunity to explore such roles, of objects, materials, silence/noise, of borderline walks, of neutrality, of each other.
Allyson Spellacy, August 2023
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