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The Sputtering, Human-Shaped Machine

Curated by Jerry Blackman

January 13th - February 19th 

Opening reception: Friday January 13th 2017, 6 - 9 PM

Phillip Birch, Alex Bunn, Nathaniel Lieb, Maya Manvi and Deirdre Sargent

There is a trope within the science fiction film genre where a seemingly human character is revealed to be an android. This is done through any number of techniques: in the Terminator films, the human flesh is burned or blasted off to reveal a shiny chrome robot skull. In the Alien franchise the androids are more fluid-based, and the contrast between the mechanical and the organic forms is more subtle. Some of the androids in Steven Spielberg's A.I. and similarly in Michael Crichton's Westworld open cleanly with doors pivoting elaborately at previously unseen seams. Whatever the case, the formal punch of this image is consistently seductive, terrifying, and saturated with visual power and metaphor. It is the moment that our fantasies collapse. It's the material of a thing's manufacture articulating itself. A reminder of the ephemerality of all things, and a dark proposal for our frail human futures.

For The Sputtering, Human-Shaped Machine, I've asked five artists whose work I know deals with both materiality and science-fiction-themes to consider this prompt and respond with a work however they feel is appropriate. The idea of skins and membranes is pervasive throughout the show, as is the motif of a work's infrastructure being activated. Phillip Birch's bust of Constantine quite overtly positions an interior narrative in conflict with an exterior shell. Here Birch is riffing off of the fringe-conspiracy-culture claim that some of primitive civilization's notable and influential accomplishments might have in fact been the doings of aliens. His response to this is to posit that the modern world too might have had some of it's figures hijacked by alien intelligence. Constantine, who was the first Roman Emperor to convert to Christianity and, in turn, promote its spread through Europe, is seen here as a hollow skin with an elaborate, cosmic warp within it: like a puppet with an unknowable intelligence at the controls. Alex Bunn's image similarly plays with the ambiguity of boundaries and the relationship between vessels and what they might contain. Just on the periphery of representation, Bunn builds intricate environments and photographs them for large scale so what we see might be from under a microscope or from an airplane window. Taking cues from medical equipment, horror films, and architectural models, Bunn conjures harrowing moods latent with foreboding and panic. The formal play between surface and interiority is pursued again in Nathaniel Lieb's ceramic pieces. These barnacle like constructions hang in the gallery like some sort of alien fungus, slowly accumulating and growing to take over the spaceship. Their dirt colored skin provides the perfect incubator for the incongruous textures within. Lieb is a seasoned maker of things often taking simple forms, processes, or materials and pushing them to their limits to arrive at potent metaphors. Maya Manvi's video Baptismal Font splices differently textured stories ranging from the mythological to the info-graphical in exploration of how bodies arrive at their humanity within the fray of language, image, sound, and science. The work weaves together a brutalist 1970's water park, the rituals of cells as they collapse breast milk canals (and the ironically dilapidated lab they are studied in), the sculpting of reality TV editors, and a story told throughout 60 years -when, once, a man was cured of his childhood asthma by swallowing a live fish. Together these vignettes explore how soft slippages, decay, and accident make up the machinery of being human. The photographic triptych and companion portrait are part of a larger ongoing project by Deirdre Sargent about social media star Valeria Lukyanova, ‘The Human Barbie Doll'. Lukyanova claims to be an alien life form many thousands of years old who has inhabited scores of human hosts. In interviews between Sargent and her muse, who resides predominantly in Mexico and communicates in Russian through her husband's broken translation, she continually refutes the possibility of her death. Her highly manicured persona along with her 424k Instagram followers offers some version of this proposal, but the utopian fantasy shows growing signs of weariness as the inevitable rises like the tide.

-Jerry Blackman

Phillip Birch, (b. 1978, Detroit, MI) received his BFA from the College for Creative Studies, Detroit. Recent solo exhibitions include Entering God Mode at Essex Flowers, NY and Master Dynamic: Frontier at Lyles and King, NY. He also recently participated in NY's Sculpture Center's annual InPractice open call juried exhibition Fantasy Can Invent Nothing New. Birch is adjunct professor at The City College of New York, and currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

Alex Bunn, (b. 1975, London, ENG) lives and works in London and Oslo, NO. His first institutional solo show opened at Trafo Kunsthall, Oslo in 2016 to national critical acclaim. Previously, his work has been exhibited at the Frieze Art Fair, The Royal Institution, and the Victoria and Albert museum in solo shows in London, Oslo, and Oakland as well as group shows in London, New York, Stockholm, Oslo, and Tokyo . His work has also appeared in Aesthetica, I-D, and Nature, among others.

Nathaniel Lieb, (b. 1963, Boston, MA) received his MFA from CUNY Brooklyn College, NY and his BFA from Syracuse University. Exhibitions include Morongo: AZ West's, High Desert Test Sites, Joshua Tree CA, Governors Island Art Fair, Governors Island NY, Gimme Shelter: Woodstock Birdcliffe Guild, Woodstock NY and IN-SITES: the intersection of art and architecture, South Orange. He was most recently artist in residence at Amherst College, MA.

Maya Manvi, (b. 1987, Los Angeles, CA) works with sculpture, text, and moving image. Their works have been exhibited in San Francisco, New York, and elsewhere. They are currently co editing/curating a year long archiving project of OUT/look an intersectional 1980's queer publication, that will be exhibited in October of 2017. Manvi received an MFA in sculpture from the Yale University School of Art, New Haven, CT in 2014 and a BFA from UC Santa Cruz, CA in 2009. They are a visiting professor of Sculpture at Caldwell University and lives and work in New York.

Deirdre Sargent, (b. 1985, Boston, MA) received her MFA from Yale University in 2013, and her BFA from Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, NY in 2008. Recent solo and two-person shows include You Should Know When to Laugh at 315 Gallery, NYC, Island Girl on Video, AC Institute, NYC, and Mod Coms at The Arta Center Gallery, MA. She is adjunct professor at The College of New Jersey and currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

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Ilana Savdie, Cucumber QT, 2016

Good Work Gallery presents: “Vital Enhancements”

Curated by Sara Blazej

Opening reception Saturday, June 25, 6 – 9 PM Open by appointment (Please contact Info@goodworkgallery.com)

Featuring work by: Alexander Heffesse Aria MacManus & Raine Trainor Signe Pierce Ilana Savdie Cecilia Salama With performances to be announced by Allison Brainard and others…

Vital Enhancements brings together artists exploring the relation between anxiety, optimism and the consumer impulse central to commercial Wellness culture.

In her 2013 monograph Cruel Optimism, theorist Laurie Berlant describes optimistic relations as mobilizing forces that pull us out of ourselves and into the world, ostensibly leading us closer to our ultimate desires. These relations may involve food, a kind of love, or simply a new habit which promises to induce an improved way of being, yet they stand to become toxic when the aspirational object impedes the overall aim that brought us to it initially. This dynamic, according to Berlant, culminates in a relation of “cruel optimism” fueled by cycles of hope, consumption, and disappointment. It is through the lens of this sentiment that Vital Enhancements looks at the mechanisms driving commercial Wellness culture as we experience it’s growing influence on the physical and mental landscapes of modern life.

Predicated on a rhetoric of improvement, perfection and longevity, the Wellness mentality best finds footing within individualist, consumer populations obsessively concerned with personal value and delaying physical and moral decay. As this mentality is easily commodified in a visual culture where desires are manifested through aspirational mass media and advertising, the notion of a more perfect self tends to find shape not in an evolved, abstract sense of well-being, but rather settles in various prescriptive consumer products and systems: anti-aging items, nutritional regimens, fitness programs, etc. This exhibition plays formally with these objects of optimism – each a well packaged promise within a series of promises made by an industry based on guaranteed results. It explores our subjective relationship to the things designed to provoke in us an excitement for a better self in a brighter future while habituating the impulse to buy and buy into.

The featured works draw on the visual language and materiality of Health, Fitness and Beauty products, deconstructing and recontextualizing familiar items of enhancement to reflect the unease and absurdity of being marketed one’s own self improvement. In varying ways they examine the roles of underlying neuroses, manufactured hopefulness and compulsive consumer behavior in cuing and commodifying a population’s appetite for “beauty, health and happiness.” Signe Pierce turns utopian marketing tropes in on themselves with advertorial visions of surreal dystopian spa interiors. Her photographs suggest spaces and apparel designed in another dimension for another breed of humans without affect, while Aria MacManus and Raine Trainor confront the anxieties facing the humans of now. They seek to alleviate the humiliation of routine body maintenance with HYGENIUS, a series of whimsical product innovations sleekly designed for discreet self care in the public domain. Of this series, they present Sheer Udder Brilliance, a multipurpose luxury purse which will be submitted for patent upon purchase. Alexander Heffesse’s wall sculpture also takes the form of consumer goods, but alternatively, his grocery store beverage display suggests availability for mass consumption. Heffesse’s melting gradient of Vita Coco bottles and halved football coconuts present a conversation between the physical properties of coconut oil and paraffin wax, disrupting our perception of the items we purchase and ingest beyond their highly palatable manufactured presentation. Cecilia Salama assembles work out items to weave a narrative around her obsession with a YouTube gymnast, connecting with her fantasy through the instruments and imagery on which she and her online viewers base her identity. In a move to reclaim commercial imagery for creative expression, Ilana Savdie digitally renders cosmetic facial masks into frenzied abstractions with the same Photoshop retouching palette used in their creation, ultimately transforming them into intoxicatingly vivid large scale paintings.

Sara Blazej

Brooklyn, NY 2016

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Good Work Gallery invites you to the unveiling of new wall pieces by Scott Goodman in conjunction with The Moran Bondaroff Holiday Party and Knowledge Wave at  Santos Party House. The evening will feature performances curated by Sara Blazej in which performers Bebe Yama, Rebecca Fin Simonetti, SADAF and others will offer complementary views on the topic of visual disruption familiar to Goodman’s work.

Being activated by black light, the murals’ lines bear an iridescent, foggy glow that belies their ostensibly flat, graphic means of articulation. Similarly oppositional, as this soft glow is, to the hard lines it emanates from. Its rigid pattern defines within each mural, that which is established only to relax and dissolve. Square tiling in the stairwell to the south of the venue undulates like caustic light at the bottom of a swimming pool. While a stone wall in the north stairwell swirls like cappuccino foam in the hands of an expert barista. Patio rocks warp, torque and flex around the venue’s upstairs room leaving viewers immersed in an interior space made of exterior features that is as hard and flat as it is malleable and soft.

Scott Goodman was born in 1983, is a graduate of The Cooper Union, and is the founder of Good Work Gallery.

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The Lorax Poems

Good Work Gallery is pleased to present The Lorax Poems, a group exhibition curated by Zach Smith, featuring:

Michael Assiff Morgan Blair Mikkel Carl Carson Fisk-Vittori Ani Geragosian Ella Goerner Cecilia Salama Jo Shane

Opening October 3rd, 6pm to 9pm

The show navigates the space between science and poetry. Subsisting off a media diet by turns populist and academic, it highlights artists for whom environmental awareness takes myriad forms. Hopefully, here, a paean to the natural world emerges.

"All day most days we adapt in microscopic ways, folding our habits in upon themselves. When possible we entertain eclectic viewpoints, scan bursts of image and description, flit through global events like specks on a windshield. Through artisanal everything and a deluge of apps we enter feedback loops of self-fulfilling innovation. We teeter on the edge of a legitimately vicious cycle: changing how we change, improving on ways we improve. And if it was too late we probably wouldn’t know… which all sounds pretty pessimistic, as it’s intended to.

We need tons of inconvenient truths constantly hurled at us, even as time renders most of them unfounded, bogus and annoying. A select few may turn out very real, to resonate and shake our plodding dialogue into new shapes, which art as a micro-world and the real world as itself need to thrive.

Unfortunately, full-blown jeremiads don’t do well with audiences. So to protect this one from the dull ears it might fall on otherwise, one revered literary figure comes to mind.

The Lorax is forest entity famous for saying things nobody wants to hear. A living torrent of dissent, this Dr. Seuss masterstroke eventually becomes so grating that self-banishment seems like the right thing to do. He disappears forever at which point everyone misses him. Turns out he was right about a lot of stuff, chiefly that the natural world demands our full attention.

This exhibition gathers, far and wide, the work of artists who encounter nature as built on something akin to poetry, more than just a string of networks. To get there though, they embrace absolutely current science and up-to-date academic research. The cohort’s output also speaks of lucid familiarity with hypermodern, urbane lifestyles. So, a rare balance is struck here between sublime encounters with the uncanny and snapshots of our feverish half-digital everyday, all maintaining a taste for empirical detail. This omnivorous approach opens new avenues for brazen lateral conjecture and hermetic leaps of faith.

It’s an approach that found a patron saint in the poet Bill Knott (1940-2014), who remained polarizing across decades of a singular literary career. He lobbed disruptive game-changing ideas into the American poetry community, while moving further and further off the grid. The effect was of digging one’s heels in so far they stick out the other side. By warping contemporary views of authorship and the tenuous state of publishing to his own ends, Knott pioneered confessional transparency, fearless of oversharing.

With Knott and The Lorax as spirit animals, these works together might suggest an ethereal register of protest, at which one could speak on issues too abstract to gain their footing in a larger dialogue. They could be ideas too far in the future or not widely understood enough, waiting on a dedicated few to translate. This goes for art, technology, the natural world, and all combinations thereof. For example, we continue fetishizing speed, so why not get equally high off stillness? Neither is any more intellectually rigorous than the other. Not to mention both waste labor, resources, and time. The sun also rises on a global, virtual city that, while evolving exponentially, feels it doesn’t need to sleep. Hopefully, throughout The Lorax Poems, expertise emboldens impulse, overflowing into strategies of note to those who would 'speak for the trees.'" -Zach Smith

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Jonathan Basile: Fictional Archives, Archival Fictions

Friday September 11th, 8—10pm

A lecture and discussion exploring the online universal library, libraryofbabel.info

ONE NIGHT ONLY — libraryofbabel.info is a virtual recreation of an idea that has inspired philosophers and poets from the Ancient Greek Atomists to Jorge Luis Borges. By permuting a complete set of letters and punctuation, one can arrive at every possible utterance, including past and future literary masterpieces and day to day conversations. We will gather to consider together how the concepts of presence and absence, invention and discovery, and novelty and repetition can be undermined by the universal library, and how any archive can exist without physical form, embedded in the essence of language.

Jonathan Basile is a fiction writer, philosopher, and computer programmer. He created an online universal library (https://libraryofbabel.info/) and universal image archive (https://babelia.libraryofbabel.info/). He has written about his work in Flavorwire (http://flavorwire.com/515783/brooklyn-author-recreates-borges-library-of-babel-as-infinite-website) and The Paris Review Daily (http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2015/07/23/the-library-of-babel-as-seen-from-within/).

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Video Stills from Untitled (green), by Samantha Harmon

Good Work Gallery is pleased to present the exhibition and book launch for  “This Dog Needs A Name”, a group exhibition and book organized by Kerry Cox and featuring works by:

Anna Adler Caitlin Baucom Courtney Childress Erin Marie Dunne Samantha Harmon Dominique Hurth Honey McMoney Reuben Lorch Miller Adam Pape Ryann Slauson Erin Sweeny THERE THERE & Frank Traynor

Book featuring works and essays by:

Anna Adler Caitlin Baucom Christiana Cefalu Courtney Childress Kerry Cox Erin Marie Dunne Daniel Esparza Samantha Harmon Dominique Hurth Honey McMoney Edgar Meza Reuben Lorch Miller Adam Pape Ryann Slauson Erin Sweeny THERE THERE & Frank Traynor

Opening Saturday July 18: Performances by Honey McMoney and Anna Adler

Screening of Sam Harmon’s Untitled (green)

Closing Saturday August 8: Performance by Caitlin Baucom

“This Dog Needs A Name” is the first in a series of annual or semi annual exhibitions called the “Notebook Series” that is also a book. Assuming the role of artist as curator, I am tracing common interests across a group of friends and acquaintances. The artists and writers included here often use fictitious elements to create non-fictitious narratives, or glean elements from non-fiction to create fictions. They are interested in character development through objects and use elements of surreality to bring us into commonplace themes. Also, this show is based on the following story.

One warm night a few weeks ago some friends and I found a dog in Bed Stuy. She had no collar but was well groomed and a nice guy from the neighborhood was feeding her canned food on paper plate. For the next twelve hours, this dog was all we could talk about. We had no idea where she came from but we wanted to make sure she was taken care of. We began to refer to her as “Choochi”, after Socrates Bueno, the Lower East Side Barber. That night, a kid decided to take her home to see if he could keep her, or until we could figure out something more permanent. In the morning, he told us his mom wouldn’t let him keep her. He had decided to sell her for $150. It took ten minutes. We never even knew her name.

Like Choochi, all the works in this show are the product of a narrative that may be real or imagined. In Samantha Harmon’s video “Untitled (green)”, Harmon portrays a hedge fund manager who laments not becoming an artist. In this confessional video portrait, Harmon’s character matches her clothing to money and tells us about her ideas for art projects. In works from his photo series “Blunts and Skunks” Adam Pape fixes his lens on the nighttime life of Dyckman Park in Inwood creating an eerie Lynchian documentary photo series. In Ryann Slauson’s sculpture “Preservation”, a paper mache bicycle wheel hangs from a branch, a scene of a possible suburban melodrama or the result of an abandoned petit theft.

The “This Dog Needs A Name” book features collaborations between artists and writers whose work has similar connective tissue. It serves as a sort of expanded exhibition catalog and independent work of print in its own write. It is produced by EAT editions in an edition of 50 and available for sale, here.

- Kerry Lynn Kox, 2015

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The Sorcerer/Apprentice

June 5th, 7-10pm

In conjunction with Bushwick Open Studios

Good Work Gallery is pleased to present “The Sorcerer/Apprentice”, an exhibition of works by Karl Gitter, Scott Goodman, and Joshua Caleb Weibley.

It was in the summer of 2011 that Scott Goodman was first contracted to produce vinyl signage for the German painter and conceptualist Karl Gitter. The size of the job necessitated bringing in additional hands and Goodman reached out to Joshua Caleb Weibley, with whom he had done similar work in the past. They completed the installation—to Gitter’s great satisfaction—ahead of schedule and under budget. The gallery in Chelsea where the three first met would move several times that year before ultimately closing in the end of 2012, but Goodman and Weibley have maintained a relationship with Gitter over the years since, nonetheless.

Now in his late 60s, Gitter is of roughly the same generation as Goodman and Weibley’s parents but is lesser known in America than he is abroad. Likewise, he claims not to have heard of any of the American conceptualists whose work his most closely resembles (Sol LeWitt being a fair comparison), citing instead László Moholy-Nagy or Blinky Palermo and Imi Knoebel (with whom he was acquainted during brief study at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf). Recognizing Gitter’s influence on their work, Goodman and Weibley are pleased he has allowed them to present his work for the first time in Brooklyn alongside their own.

The slash in the resulting exhibition’s title, “The Sorcerer/Apprentice”, confuses the relationship of light mentorship Gitter, Goodman and Weibley have shared while evoking a magical animation of inert domestic materials (referring, as it does, to Goethe’s “Der Zauberlehrling”, popularly known worldwide by its 1940 Walt Disney adaptation).

Scott Goodman’s prop-like paintings demarcate domestic space using flat, graphic shapes and colors that produce a paradoxical illusionistic sensation swinging back and forth between something less than real and hyperreal. The archway he has created for this exhibition suggests an aperture opened inward beyond the wall it hangs on into an apartment complex.

Karl Gitter’s work in scrawled notes and labored but precise drawings asks to be considered in terms of shifts in scale from an interior domestic setting outward. His small drawings are native to the space of a writing desk set by a window (perhaps even just inside the one Goodman has made) but they are patiently sketched out with the intention of being executed by others elsewhere. For this exhibition Goodman and Weibley will execute one of his works in the medium that first brought the three of them into contact with each other and have prepared a vinyl window mural to his specifications. Also on view will be a selection of his drawings including those directing the mural’s creation.

Joshua Caleb Weibley’s solitaire works hold to the scale Gitter’s work first emerges at and more directly (if humorously) illustrate the shuffling of papers involved in such work “coming into play” as finished pieces for consideration. The work begins in drawing at a desk before being submitted to further production processes and arranged for display, suggesting that creation and reception of art can be, each in their own way, two very separate and somewhat solitary activities.

1100 Broadway is open for Bushwick open studios

NEW WORK BY: Emily Collins, Scott Goodman, Phyllis Ma, Maren Miller, Alex Phillips, Saki Sato, Clay Schiff, Matt Taber, and Faren Ziello.

OPEN: Friday, June 5th, 7-10pm Saturday, June 6th, 12pm-6pm Sunday, June 7th, 12pm-6pm

Sponsored by: Pabst Blue Ribbon

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Catherine Pearson: A Feeling

Book Launch and Exhibition

May 2 – May 22, 2015 Opening reception Saturday, May 2nd, 6-9pm.

Good Work Gallery is pleased to present the book launch of A Feeling by Catherine Pearson and an exhibition of her most recent paintings. A Feeling uses collage, photography, and watercolor with an immediacy and intimacy which contrasts and complements her more labor-intensive large scale work. The book provides both a context and a key to her approach to abstraction: content as a glimpse, as a feeling grasped. Pearson graduated from Cooper Union in 2010.

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Master & Lingo - New Sculpture by Maren Miller & Saki Sato 

Opening this Saturday, March 21, 6 -9 PM

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Master & Lingo: New Sculptures by Maren Miller and Saki Sato

Opening Saturday, March 21st, 6-9pm.

Saki Sato and Maren Miller are long-time friends and collaborators. For the show Master & Lingo, Sato’s sculptures originate from the ceiling and Miller’s begin at the floor. Both occupy the abstract space where image is translated into object, and object into image.

They last showed work together in February 2010, and most recently curated a show of public sculpture in an abandoned lot in Brooklyn. Sato and Miller graduated The Cooper Union in 2010.

To see their previous work, visit their websites: http://www.marenmiller.com/art/ http://www.sakisato.com/

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ONE NIGHT ONLY – Not quite a screening, not quite a lecture, Mysteries will present a survey of Shields’ short videos, excerpts, and performative demonstrations. This body of work investigates Shields’ interactions with physical and virtual spaces using simulations, animations and bodily actions....

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ONE NIGHT ONLY – Not quite a screening, not quite a lecture, Mysteries will present a survey of Shields’ short videos, excerpts, and performative demonstrations. This body of work investigates Shields’ interactions with physical and virtual spaces using simulations, animations and bodily actions. Don’t miss this one-time performance!

Taylor Shields received his BFA from Cooper Union (Sculpture and Video, ’09). Since then, he has continued screening videos, collaborated with DADDY http://daddybydaddy.com, and was featured in Megazine’s last issue http://megazinemagazine.com/wagon-dreams/ He is also self taught in 3D modeling software and works as a miniature model fabricator. He lives and works in New York City. To preview some of Taylor Shields’ work, visit his website. http://dtaylorshields.com

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Freudian Slippers

Jan 23 - Feb 14th Opening reception: Friday, Jan 23 from 6-9pm After Party will follow at Lone Wolf Bar located conveniently near the gallery at 1089 Broadway.

Curated by Nicole Lucaroni and Sara Blazej

Featuring: Jamie Fletcher, Paris Hynes, Manal Kara, and Jason Martin

Good Work Gallery presents Freudian Slippers, an exhibition which depicts the con- stantly evolving significance of fetish aesthetics in art, and explores a subversion of power conventions interpreted through creative means.

The various aesthetics of fetish culture have deep art history lineage. Since nascent documentation over a century ago, imagery evoking submissiveness, the Gay un- derground, and play with power dynamics has proliferated itself into a mainstream consciousness through standard (and non-standard) media representation. Major social transformation and sexual revolution have allowed for altered and heightened percep- tions of desire to reshape and broaden the cultural landscape of fetishism today. In this exhibition, the subversive and taboo topic is skewed with humor, play, and practicality through form. With a tongue-in-cheek attitude, these artists attempt to bring the viewer closer to understanding and challenging their own perspectives on sexuality and fetish.

Jamie Fletcher The “leather daddy” and “gimp” are two of the most recognizable fetishes we see. They have been around for years in gay eroti- cism, and have a long history in sadomasochistic fantasy. We continually see versions of this aesthetic in many current forms of media, such as films, advertisements, television, and routinely gracing fashion runways. In Fletcher’s work, however, we see a more painterly vision of this fetish, and with a woman’s perspective. Chains, masks, leather, and male-on male-submission are idealized – something not traditionally idealized in a hetero-normative world – and used to subtly express her struggles with her own femininity. Fletcher currently works and resides in NYC.

Paris Hynes Paris Hynes’ series of oil paintings depicts figures in fetish attire - typically the iconic bondage suit, or gimp suit. Combining the visual extreme of latex-covered bodies with the humorously banal way in which they are presented - standing alongside a tall potted houseplant, or confronting the viewer as a masked bust - Hynes pokes fun at both traditional portraiture as well as the perception of fetishists as deviant Others. He sources the images for these works from the Internet by culling photographs from deep fetish forums and blogs. He also uses commercial photos of products on bondage gear websites. Hynes’ carefully seductive rendering of the latex surfaces reveal a fixation on the textural qualities of the costumes, and suggest a conscious lean toward a more aesthetic appreciation of the BDSM experience. He lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

Manell Kara Her work takes traditional forms of houseware and décor, such as vases, cups and mugs, and undermines the original homemaker intention with the humorous use of breasts and penises. Conversely, her S&M product line, White Worm, flips the “evil sex dun- geon” look of most S&M toys and tools with its lighthearted flair of electric colors and playful new shapes. Kara is a Chicago- based artist and Dominatrix, and her works can also be found in local Brooklyn-based boutiques and showrooms.

Jason Martin Jason Martin is an artist and musician who has been producing television, video, photography and other forms of media since the early ‘80s. His most recent performances and videos are part of an ongoing project named Animal Power Systems, a species and gender-queer exploration channeled through hybrid beings from otherworldly origin. The first appearance of his wolf character was used in the LP cover art for his band Brown Cuts Neighbors and the public broadcast TV show by the same name. His draw- ings elicit a mix of power dynamics veiled in the use of fetish roleplaying games and cartoon imagery. Martin is currently based in upstate New York and performs in NYC at many of its alternative venues.

Opening hours: Every Saturday & Sunday, Jan 24 - Feb 14, 2014. 12 PM - 6 PM.

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RENDERING

RENDERING Nov 8 – 23 Opening reception: Saturday, November 8 from 6-9pm 1100 Broadway, Brooklyn, NY 11221

Curated by Scott Goodman

Featuring: Graham Anderson, Jerry Blackman, Andrew Graham, Caitlin Keogh, Carly Mark, Matthew Palladino, Ben Sanders, and Eric Shaw

Good Work Gallery is pleased to present rendering, an exhibition of paintings displaying graphic characteristics of clipart, logos, textile patterns and other visuals of a commercial nature. This group of artists, who are digital natives, re-approach mainstream sensibilities on their own terms, and in doing so, create paintings which draw on and refresh histories of Pop imagery. The impersonal, immediate, and immaterial qualities of the digital image are contrasted and underlined by the intrinsically human, physical act of painting by hand, using a brush.

Replicating a mechanical line with paint requires restriction of the body to only the most essential movements to carrying out the task. The pulsation of blood through one’s veins and capillaries, or the expansion and contraction of the lungs is enough to disturb the trajectory of a line being drawn between two points. The comparison of man to machine-made production brings attention to the shifting role of the artist in relation to evolving image-making technologies. By implementing painting to produce the effects of machinery, as is the case with the works in this show, the artist mimics the machine, suspending aspects of their own humanity while also accentuating it in the act.

Matthew Palladino’s The Draftsman’s Malaise depicts a space entirely composed of clip art, in which a canvas sits perched on an easel articulated in bold black lines of eerily uniform weight. The pictured canvas features three red cups containing the same arrangement of drafting tools: two pencils, a pair of exacto knives, a ruler, and a paintbrush; all utensils that imply the artists’ hand.

Graham Anderson depicts malleable, planar worlds, mechanically bending comic elements within them around each other. Untitled, depicts a folded cat in an autoerotic sexual act. Whether the image is a highly stylized depiction of a real cat or a realistic depiction of a stylized cat is ambiguous.

Ben Sanders and Eric Shaw incorporate flat sharply delineated brush-stroke-like shapes that simultaneously direct our attention to the gestural application of paint by hand and to the computerized simulation of a paintbrush tool made available through graphic editing programs like Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop.

Carly Mark’s floral design in Event Horizon calls to mind the copy/paste and fill commands used for transferring, extending and flooding data from multiple sources.

Andrew Graham mimics the graphic and formal qualities of the CAPTCHA, an acronym for “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart,” which tests the presence of a human onlooker by their ability to recognize, separate, and contextualize distorted numerical and alphabetical combinations.

Jerry Blackman’s untitled series of hybridized cartoons also tests human recognition by splicing together attributes of popular cartoon characters we know from screen and print. The sensation of being reintroduced to ones own family in the horrific aftermath of a facial transplant surgery is evoked. Winnie the Pooh’s ears protrude from Garfield’s head while Bamm-Bamm’s skeleton has somehow slipped under a Bart Simpsons skin suit.

The articulation of Caitlin Keogh’s Argyle patterning in Successful Multiple Retailers draws from textile design. It softly, subtly undulates in a decidedly human manner that glories in fallibility as much as in control and precision.

Opening hours: Saturday & Sunday, 12 – 6pm, and by appointment

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Lazy Mom : Still Lives

LAZY MOM Still Lives Sept 20 – Oct 19, 2014 opening reception: Saturday Sept 20, 2014 6 – 9 PM

“It’s so beautifully arranged on the plate—you know someone’s fingers have been all over it.”

– Julia Child

Good Work Gallery is pleased to present Still Lives, a solo exhibition of photographs and sculptures by LAZY MOM, a collaboration between artists Josie Keefe and Phyllis Ma. This exhibition marks the first LAZY MOM exhibition in New York, and will be on view from September 20 to October 19, 2014.

Still Lives explores imaginative tangents on traditional food photography in the form of still lifes. The images reference art history and modern commercial aesthetics, from Flemish painting and product photography to culinary plating techniques. However, instead of emphasizing or advertising taste and smell visually, Still Lives features food and other familiar objects in compositions that suggest otherworldly landscapes and portraits. Objects are removed from any direct narrative or purpose but retain a sense of anthropomorphic emotion.

Depicted are commonplace items such as fruit, flowers and money, combined into formations of dreamlike kitsch. For instance, Geometric Floral shows a bouquet of brightly colored bodega flowers, dissembled and then reassembled into a perfect cube of household gelatin. Stripes of raw bacon are wrapped around cotton candy pink hair rollers, suggesting the capricious whims of a bored housewife. And a baloney sandwich is rearranged based on a set of undisclosed aesthetic rules. Through humor, LAZY MOM deconstructs tradition feminine icons of sentimentality and preciousness, and imbues them with a new sense of order and significance. It is as if Mom is showing us the beauty of the world while telling us, “Here, go make yourself a sandwich.”

In exploring another definition of “humor,” the images in Still Lives are organized into families based on Greco-Roman proto-psychological concept of the four humors. The idea refers to bodily fluids that were thought to define a person’s personality and health, and consist of choleric (risk takers), sanguine (light), melancholic (introverted), and phlegmatic (calm). This is an early example of how man created basic artificial systems in order to understand the natural world. By grouping the images into four humors, personalities of the still lifes are emphasized and objects are transformed from order to chaos and then back to an absurd level of organization. In this way, LAZY MOM dismantles man’s attempts to order nature by creating a new aesthetic system from banal materials. These carefully manipulated arrangements create a landscape of domestic detritus where the real and fake merge to form the surreal.

Josie Keefe was born in 1987 Syracuse, New York and lives and works in New York City. She studied anthropology and visual arts at Columbia University, and has worked as a prop stylist. Phyllis Ma was born in 1987 Guangzhou, China and lives and works in New York City. She studied visual arts at Columbia University as well as fashion design at the Fashion Institute of Technology.

LAZY MOM is their first collaboration, born from their first self-published photography zine titled “LAZY WOW.” “Still Lives” showcases images produced for this zine, along with images that have culminated into their second zine of the same title as the exhibition. “LAZY WOW” is currently available at MoMA PS1, the New Museum, Printed Matter, and at www.lazymomnyc.com