Jack

Ian Burns
Adam Cvijanovic
Gedi Sibony

Curated by Christopher K. Ho and Mari Spirito

At CUCHIFRITOS art gallery/project space.

May 21 - June 25, 2005

Opening reception: Saturday May 21, 4-6pm
Open daily thereafter, Monday through Saturday 12:00 noon to 5:30pm. Closed Sundays

The artists in Jack approach the relationship between artwork, viewer, and narrative in three different ways. Adam Cvijanovic's New City, 2002/2005, a site-modified wall mural, envelops the viewer and transports him/her into a fictional world. The scale of the work is reiterated by its somewhat imperial imagery: a new development of two-story homes inserted into the landscape. In Ian Burns' sculpture, Passing the Relatives, 2004, the viewer encounters the object and peers through a window into a kinetic scene of a running horse and telephone pole. Visually engrossed in the scene, the viewer's body also remains grounded in the gallery. If Cvijanovic's work is encompassing, and Burns' provides a window into a parallel world, Gedi Sibony's Untitled, 2005, a restrained sculpture of found objects leaning against one another, remains squarely in the here-and-now.

The new housing developments that Cvijanovic depicts in New City often appear with a suddenness that makes them seem conjured from thin air, and in a way, they are: built on spec and marketed with hype, they trade on the fantasy of owning a home with garage and lawn, of joining a local community and acquiescing to a bland and seemingly blissful suburban life. But even as the houses promise a perfect future, an air of forlornness, even nostalgia, permeates the work. The gently curving road in the painting leads to nowhere. The insatiable desire to advance and lay claim to one's surroundings is not only the subject matter of New City but is embodied in the painting's expansiveness.

Burns' Passing the Relatives exudes an intimate, homemade quality. Approximately the size of a human figure, the sculpture functions as a small puppet theatre. Through a face-like window, the viewer engages with the endlessly repeating fragment of a narrative. A horse at full gallop never gets far from a nearby telephone pole, on which a bird perches. The sculpture is at once economical in its tale and excessive in the means it takes to tell it. Constructed with raw two-by-fours and found objects, Passing the Relatives resembles the idiosyncratic product of a garage inventor. Its inner workings are exposed and can viewed from all sides. The work recalls an earlier era when the advancement of mankind was driven by the curiosity of individuals.

Global tourism sends people around the world to far flung reaches, yet this travel only provides a superficial geographical connection. In the facile surface dealings we are used to in contemporary society the failure of any real connection between individual and society provokes anxiety. With the amount of high technology and interactive communication available, the lack of connection becomes a virtual tragicomic farce.

Sibony's Untitled, 2005, is acutely sensitive to the formal and material properties of found objectsÑoften scraps and detritus. The work consists of a fragment of a staircase tread, the cardboard filling of a door, and a silver-painted branch propped against each other. The precariousness of Sibony's freestanding workÑonly the objects' weight against each other precludes their collective collapseÑechoes the barely-there gestalt invoked, and the work comes together only to potentially come undone. Any narrative that emerges comes as much from the viewer as it does from the artwork. Sibony's work makes one more aware of their immediate surroundings at the moment it is experienced.

CUCHIFRITOS is a project of Artists Alliance Inc.

This exhibit was made possible by the following: The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, LMCC's Fund For Creative Communities/NYSCA, The New York City Economic Development Corporation, The Puffin Foundation, the Elizabeth Firestone Graham Foundation, and the members of the Artists Alliance Incorporated.