Kitty Kraus / Ulrike Müller September 17 - October 21, 2016

Selected by Israel Lund and Sam Korman

Ulrike Müller gathered expressions from a weeks worth of The New York Times for her audio installation, New York Times (February 16-22, 2003), 2003. In advance of the invasion of Iraq, the language veers between heated calls to war and ethical resignation, easily conjuring a litany of politicians behind the podium, deadlocked by popular opinion, political allegiances, and the momentum of recent history. Müller re-locates the pathos of this language in the personal, and as she monologues, the rhetoric of inevitability, both hawkish and entreating, implies an increasing and inherent violence. New York Times was originally installed at a high-up window in lower Manhattan, and viewers looked down on the city street, listening to the audio on headphones. At St. Louis’s Parapet/Real Humans, viewers look through a 4x5 inch opening on the gallery’s painted, street-level windows, that look upon a domestic neighborhood. The audio plays on a speaker in the window frame, and a 4x5 inch photograph of the original installation accompanies the audio on a nearby wall.

A shopping cart handlebar stolen from the German discount grocery chain, Lidl comprise Kitty Kraus’s Untitled, 2009. The work relates to similar works that use the same handlebars. They were placed on the floor, or near a window, and though inert, suggested ad hoc, threatening, and blunt implements. In St. Louis, the bar will be strung to a small motor on the ceiling, and spin menacingly near the body of a viewer. It was couriered by plane from Europe by a friend of the gallery, who, upon opening the package, realized the component pieces resembled an explosive device. Traditional sculpture, from Rodin to Minimalism, privileges an intimacy

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John Riepenhoff April 22 - May 23 , 2016

John Riepenhoff was born in 1982 in Milwaukee, WI and received his BFA from the Peck School of the Arts at the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee, WI. Riepenhoff is also a curator and co-owner of The Green Gallery, Milwaukee, WI. His recent exhibitions and curatorial projects have been presented at the Tate Modern, London; Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, James Fuentes, and the Swiss Institute, New York, NY; Pepin Moore, Freedman Fitzpatrick and Ooga Booga, Los Angeles, CA; Western Exhibitions, Chicago, IL; Dean Jensen Gallery, and Small Space, Milwaukee, WI. 

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Drew Heitzler March 10 - April 20, 2016

Drew Heitzler is a Los Angeles-based artist. His films and film-based projects, often made as collaborations, have been screened and exhibited internationally at galleries and institutions including The Project, Orchard Gallery, The Swiss Institute, Sculpture Center, Anthology Film Archives, PS1 Contemporary Art Center, LA><ART, The Suburban, Locust Projects, Zacheta National Gallery of Art, Kunstmuseum St. Gallen, Magasin Centre National d’Art Contemporain, Kunsthalle, Zurich, and Centre Georges Pompidou.

His work was included in the 2008 Whitney Biennial, the 2010 California Biennial, and the Hammer Museum’s 2012 Venice Beach Biennial.

In addition he was cofounder of the bicoastal exhibition project Champion Fine Art, cofounder of Triple A, a public exhibition project in Los Angeles, and continues to be co-owner of Mandrake, an artist-run bar and performance space, also in Los Angeles.

His curatorial activities for both galleries and institutions include the exhibitions Bring The War Home, Animal Style, Endless Bummer/Surf Elsewhere, Endless Bummer 2/Still Bummin’, Golden State, and Beer.

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Bleta Jahaj February 4 - March 1, 2016

Bleta Jahaj’s work raises questions about extended bodies and disconnection, relationships between concepts of myth, gender and psychology. She works in a variety of materials both synthetic and natural, soft and hard: clear glass, latex, marble, concrete, knotted and knitted rubber, cast silk, tangled wire and dangling string.

In careful, yet surprising ways, the artist molds formally contradicting materials, celebrating their inherent inconguencies through geometrical disintegration tat defies formalization and modular precision

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Mark Hagen December 12 , 2015 - January 20, 2016

Mark Hagen, born in 1972 in Black Swamp, Virginia, is a visual artist who foregrounds the interplay of materials, process, and form in his geometric, minimalistic paintings, sculptures, and installations. Artist finds inspiration in the breakdown of history, vision and hierarchies and creates works by pushing common and utilitarian materials in directions which reveal the process of making.

Hagen’s paintings are made by pushing black and white paint through lengths of rough burlap onto glass planes supporting sheets of wrinkled wrapping plastic, lengths of packing tape, geometric configurations of cut tile, and other material. Once the paints dries, the fabric is pulled from the textured surface, taking its negative imprint on what will be its facing side. Making a negative, a positive aspect of his paintings, Hagen toys with the concept of the seen and the unseen, addressing the natural limitations of human vision and the rendering of a picture in the brain.

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Olivier Mosset November 18 - December 10, 2015

OLIVIER MOSSET (b. 1944 in Bern, Switzerland) first came to prominence in France as part of the BMPT group alongside Daniel Buren, Niele Toroni and Michel Parmentier. In 2012 his work was the subject of a one-person exhibition at Kunsthalle Zurich, and in 2003 a retrospective of his work, Olivier Mosset: Travaux/Works 1966-2003, was presented at Musée Cantonal des Beaux-Arts, Lausanne, Switzerland and Kunstverein St. Gallen Kunstmuseum, Switzerland.

Mosset has been part of numerous group exhibitions including Manifesta 10, Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia (2014); the 2008 Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, NY (2008). In 1990 Mosset represented Switzerland in the 44th Venice Biennale. His work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Centre Pompidou, Paris, France; National Gallery of Canada, Ontario; and Musée Cantonal des Beaux-Arts, Lausanne, Switzerland among others. He lives and works in Tucson, Arizona.

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Jacob Kassay w/DIRT September 12 - November 15, 2015

In Greek mythology, Procustes was a bandit who physically stretched people, or cut off their legs to force them to precisely fit the size of an iron bed. Stemming from this brutal dimension or properties to confirm to its measure.

Jacob Kassay's glass sculptures invert this Procustean logic, which is to say, beds are bent around bodies. Rather than conforming to their containers, their measures determine what encase them. Inset into library books, these glass wedges use the arbitrary, public books, which fit them as temporary supports, acting as lenses which open up the information closed within. Without altering what houses them, the wedges clear an aperture into, illuminate and refract the dormant cores of these circulating objects.

Kassay's sculptures are not only Procustean, but also slightling crustacean. Like the nomadic rovings of the hermit crab, passing from vacant shell to vacant shell, the wedges inhabit library books only in interstices, their coupling bound to the limit leases of the book. In this temporary interlocking, the glass pros open a prismatic space filled with bent gradients of language and o oscillating planes of images into which vision tunnels. While a key typically opens only one door, fixed in place, what Kassay offers in these works is a far more variable form of access into interiors rarely seen in this light - more an entrance briefly held ajar with a book.

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