Places and Things

Jane Dickson, Marguerite Van Cook, Peggy Cyphers, Brigitte Engler
January 3 - February 8, 2015

Closing Reception: January 7th, 2-5 PM
RSVP : doriangreygallery@gmail.com

This group show brings together four artists‘ different representations of "place" and with its ambiguously opened ended title --"and things"--it asks, what are the "things" that matter here? These works all offer investigations of space, surfaces, depths, vistas in the paintings and marks on their surfaces. They deal with a strange temporality in enigmatic images that summon memory and imagination.
 
Brigitte Engler‘s prints capture traces of life, where sound and symbols caught up in the surface of the works record the raw creative impulse to leave a mark. Peggy Cyphers‘ paintings transport the viewer into distant imagined landscapes where abstraction slips into narrative and the familiar and the wild co-exist impossibly. Jane Dickson‘s pictures open into great melancholy spaces and yet offer a deceptively reassuring familiarity. And Marguerite Van Cook‘s images untell stories, inviting the viewer to guess at what lies outside of the pictures and create their own narratives. Hence the title "Places and Things" proposes a world that is visible and invisible.
 
"...I did not even know this existed...this world, I did not know. I thought it existed only in one‘s head, and in dreams....And now: here I am."
 
- Hélène Cixous, The Book of Promethea

 

Jane Dickson

From the vertiginous cityscapes of old Times Square to the new American landscape of windshield-viewed highway-scapes, carnival and dusty demolition derbies, presented on industrial materials ranging from sandpaper to astroturf have all found their way through Jane Dickson‘s paintings and into the canon of American art. Her work is owned by more than 30 museums including the Metropolitan Museum, the Whitney, MoMA, the Brooklyn Museum, the Library of Congress and by corporate collections including Times Equities, JP MorganChase Bank, BankAmerica and RadioShack.
 
She has won awards from the Joan Mitchell Foundation, the NEA, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, among others. Her work has been featured in hundreds of publications including The New York Times, Art in America, Art Forum, and text books including Prentice Hall‘s Art in Culture 4th ed.‘11. In 2013 she her work was featured in the Wall Street Journal. She has just been elected to membership in the prestigious National Academy of the Arts.
 

 

Marguerite Van Cook

Marguerite Van Cook‘s work utilizes an amalgam of low and high tech to create cinematic images that open spaces for the imagination and enable the viewer to experience color as a vehicle for exploration. She invites the viewer to enter the "untold" stories in the sequential imagery of her "unmade" film series.
 
Van Cook came to New York with her punk band The Innocents after touring with The Clash. She stayed, opened a gallery Ground Zero and curated numerous events and shows. Her own work as an artist and filmmaker placed her in many museum collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney Museum and the Schwartz Art Collection at Harvard. Her other credits include poet (she was awarded the Van Rensselear Prize while at Columbia), writer, critic, comic book artist and actor. Her current graphic novel in collaboration with James Romberger is a generational autobiography entitled "The Late Child and Other Animals." Her collaborative project with David Wojnarowicz and James Romberger, "Seven Miles a Second," a graphic memoir of Wojnarowicz‘s life and death is in its second edition in America.

 

 

Peggy Cyphers

Peggy Cyphers grew up in Baltimore and Chesapeake Beach, Maryland and has been inspired by the spectacular Miocene fossil deposits, Calvert Cliffs and aquatic life of the Bay since childhood. Cyphers‘s 30 solo and 180 group exhibitions have been reviewed in New York Times, Artforum, Art in America, Brooklyn Rail, Chicago Tribune, San Francisco Chronicle, etc. Grants include National Endowment for the Arts, Peter S. Reed Foundation, Elizabeth Foundation, National Studio Award PS.1, Pratt Institute. Residency awards include Yaddo, Art Omi, Tong Xian Art Beijing, Santa Fe Art Institute, ISCP, Triangle & Clocktower/P.S.1. Cyphers‘s inventive and combinatory approaches to paint, silkscreen and sand have develop into pictures that explore the "politics of progress" as it impacts on cultural evolution and the natural world. Spatial compositions defy gravity and orientation and envision transcendent spaces of expansive consciousness while glorifying the naturalist‘ss direct encounter with water, sky, earth, and all creatures.

 

 

Brigitte Engler

Born and raised in Paris, artist Brigitte Engler has called the Lower East Side her home since she first moved to New York City in 1980 to study at the Whitney Independent Study Program.
 
Since the early eighties, she has been part of the downtown art world, working as an artist and reporter covering the vibrant East Village scene for PAPER magazine. Her work has been exhibited in numerous galleries including "City Folks" (curated by Carlo McCormick and Aaron Rose) at the Holly Solomon Gallery; "Burning in Hell" (curated by Nancy Spero) at Franklin Furnace; "In the Detail" (curated by Kiki Smith) at Barbara Gross Gallery (Munich, Germany); "Nincompatible" (with Richard Hell and Walter Robinson) at the Bowman Bloom Gallery and in one person shows in Paris, Brittany and Downtown LA. Several artist projects have been published in collaboration with editors of Semiotext(e) Sylvère Lotringer and Chris Kraus.
 
For the last two decades, she has been refining an art practice that revolves around energy and movement and is informed by French philosophy and her practice of Tai Chi Chuan. Her future projects include a video of a submerged fabric art installation in a medieval tide mill in Brittany in 2016 and an upcoming one-person show on the subjectivity of memory at LA‘s Commonwealth & Council gallery.

 

 
Press
Bleeding Cool
 

Jane Dickson
Marguerite Van Cook
Peggy Cyphers
Brigitte Engler
Reception