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Maria
Dumlao
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A pre-photographic
parlor game, the silhouette traditionally created a likeness of a sitter
using paper, candlelight, and ink. The four young artists in this group
exhibition use the silhouette to mask an identity, universalize portraiture,
emphasize presence or absence. Shifts in materials, process, and scale
open this traditional form of portraiture to contemporary concerns.
The tar-encrusted black paintings of Christopher Clary, littered with
shredded gay pornography, are simultaneously menacing and vulnerable.
Clary’s obfuscating gaze disarms us, the damaged blackness of his
works infused with an uncanny passive aggression.
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Maria Dumlao’s video, Loom consists of a series of interior spaces
re-photographed from film footage. These stills are subtly manipulated
to elicit their constitutive horror. An abstract play of shadows seems
both to echo the notion of film-flicker and also to posit some hidden
form of human activity just outside the still frame.
Matt Keegan’s cut out portraits from casual snapshots allow patterns
and materials to emerge from layers of underlying images. Absence becomes
context, challenging exclusionary social structures through aesthetic
consideration.
Part death-mask, part stereotype, and part index, the photographs of Katherine
Wolkoff are both accessible and anonymous. These backlit color images
of individuals in profile render the sitters only partially identifiable.
The work challenges the desire of portraiture to identify and categorize,
instead presenting the face as something changeable but universal.
Christopher Clary received his MFA from The American University in Washington,
DC in 1996. His work has been exhibited at WORKS/San Jose, the Denver
International Airport, and the New York State Biennial.
Maria Dumlao received a BA from Rutgers College in 1994 and an MFA from
Hunter College in 2003. Recent exhibitions include Naturbeobachtungen,
Pfefferberg, Berlin, Germany, Inverse/Oslo at Galeri 21/25, Oslo, Norway,
Loophole, Dumbo arts Festival, Brooklyn, NY, and Cluster, Galapagos Art
and Performance Space, Brooklyn, NY.
Matt Keegan received a BFA from Carnegie Mellon University in 1998 and
an MFA from Columbia University in 2004. Recent group exhibitions include
High Desert Test Site in Joshua Tree, CA, Hung, Drawn and Quartered at
Team Gallery, NYC in 2004, 24/7 at Contemporary Art Center, Vilnius, Lithuania,
Today’s Man at John Connelly Presents, NYC and NFS at Andrew Kreps
Gallery, NYC in 2003.
Katherine Wolkoff received an MFA from Yale University in photography
in 2003 and received a BA from Barnard College in American history in
1998..
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