The Armory Show, March 7 -10, 2013
Pier 94, Booth 830

Glenn Kaino
Meleko Mokgosi
Kaz Oshiro
Brenna Youngblood

At 7pm on Thursday, March 7, 2013 at the Studio Museum in Harlem, Brenna Youngblood will be in discussion with Franklin Sirmans, Sadie Barnette, and Noah Davis for The Artist's Voice: West Coast Vernacular.

Glenn Kaino (b. 1970, Los Angeles) has created the first in a new series of works inspired by kyudo (Zen archery). A circle of copper arrows pierce the wall, creating a line drawing that fans out into space as if an expert archer has just passed through the booth. In kyudo, material reality by necessity exemplifies the ideals of composure, grace, perfection and harmony, achieving them by simply being. Things are as they are, and imperfections are actually perfection. There are formal and conceptual links to his series of pin drawings, in which he assembles pieces from disparate model kits, plated in precious metals, into map-like arrangements that create new forms of knowledge. Kaino expands this methodology of "kit-bashing," exploding these universes of newly compiled epistemologies formerly contained behind Plexiglas into the viewer's space. The artist describes the arrows as a "meditation on subjectivity and knowledge production," a meditation that shifts and changes over time. The piece is phenomenological experience, meant to have a bodily effect; the image resolves and dissolves as you move through space, morphing from two to three dimensions, a "drawing in space" that functions like the classic spatial illusion of the linking rings magic trick. Kaino was selected as the US representative for the upcoming Cairo Biennale.

Meleko Mokgosi (b. 1981, Botswana) shows a new series of text based paintings that critically interrogate the framing of African art in the discourse of Western art history. The artist annotates descriptive text for the current exhibition African Art, New York, and the Avant-Garde at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, adding editorial marks and marginal notes to highlight the fissures and distortions produced by the often-told story of the influence of African sculpture on modernist artists in Europe and the US. While the subtleties of historiographic methodologies have been refined since exhibitions like Primitivism at MoMA and even Magiciens de la Terre at Centre Pompidou, the pervasiveness of this narrative proves itself time and again. Mokgosi engages directly in this ongoing struggle to alter the terms of the historical narrative, literally inscribing different terms for the reception and circulation of African epistemologies. He deploys text as image, linking this work directly to his figurative "history paintings" in which he intertwines elements from various literary sources, historical and philosophical, into epic, protocinematic paintings. Recalling works such as Notes on the Margin of the Black Book and Carrie Mae Weems From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried, the artist carries on the tradition of critical dialogue with dominant narratives of art and history. Mokgosi is the inaugural winner of the Mohn Prize for his participation in the Made in L.A. biennial and an alumnus of the most recent class of residents at the Studio Museum in Harlem.

The new series of paintings by Kaz Oshiro (b. 1967, Okinawa, Japan) bears the title Still Life; indeed, Oshiro simply describes each work as a "still life of a broken painting." The minimalist canvases, a sort of elementalized vanitas for aesthetics, are abstract paintings that have been compromised - warped out of the comfortable space of the two dimensional picture plane to straddle the edges of the white cube, fold around corners, and collapse onto the floor. Like his prior work, which insisted upon its existence as painting but played in the space of sculpture, these works broach the space of the viewer. They call attention to the liminal spaces that disappear in a traditional gallery installation - its corners and edges. At first glance, these new works may seem like a radical departure for the artist. His previous works, remarkably realistic three-dimensional facsimiles of everyday objects like old microwave ovens, dumpsters, kitchen cabinets, and car bumpers, meticulously fabricated from paint and bondo on canvas, are, however, a conceptual antecedent for the new paintings. In all these works, Oshiro extends the idea of painting as a spatial and conceptual practice, distilling it to its most essential status as object and calling attention to its physical, phenomenological effects. Taking inspiration from artists like Ellsworth Kelly, Imi Knoebel, Blinky Palermo, Fred Sandback and Michael Asher, Oshiro manipulates the idea of minimal abstraction, processing it through a rigorous, conceptually driven practice that make the idea and experience of space a primary concern. The canvases, which also allude to the work of California Light and Space artists, are nearly monochromatic, adding only a second tone that playfully alludes to shadowing in proximity to the real shadows created by the bends and folds of the frame; this hint at the illusory possibility of paint on canvas inverts the sort of spills and stains that disrupt the pristine surfaces of some of his earlier tromp l'oeil objects. Through the Still Lives, Oshiro not only clarifies the concerns of his previous bodies of work but also continues to extend the boundaries of what it means to make a painting. Oshiro will have a solo exhibiton at Honor Fraser Gallery in April, and currently has work in Lifelike, an exhibition that opened at the Walker Art Center in February 2012, traveled to the New Orleans Museum of Art, and is now on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego.

Brenna Youngblood (b. 1979, Riverside, California) makes work that spans the territories of photography, painting, assemblage and sculpture, united by an interest in disrupting conventional ideas about the forms of our everyday life. In her most recent works, she continues to explore the limits of her materials in a series of new paintings. The terms that the artist sets for the relationship between the representation, the real and the sign have become increasingly complex. Employing the techniques of collage and repetition, layering images and words as almost painterly materials, Youngblood returns to forms that have captured her attention in the past - an exit sign, a diamond, wooden slats - deploying them in new ways. Here, an oversized gem, blinged out with facets of color and faux shine, comes off the wall and into our space. An assemblage of wooden scraps serves as the ground for a colorful abstract painting, as if a section of the artist's studio floor has been extracted and hung on the wall. Youngblood's freedom with the materials and forms that she has been exploring for the past several years results in a clarified, rich visual vocabulary. Shaped canvases and increasingly abstracted sculptures and paintings, either flirting with minimalism or reveling in material excess, chart further explorations into the generative possibilities of the vacillation between image and object, representation and abstraction. Youngblood's work is currently featured in the Studio Museum in Harlem's exhibition Fore, and a monograph of her work will be published this year by The Mistake Room.