A Fist Full Of Feathers
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Press Release
BRAD KAHLHAMER
A Fist Full of Feathers
October 18 – November 16, 2013
Opening reception: Friday, October 18th, from 6 – 8 PM at 524 West 24th Street.
Jack Shainman Gallery is pleased to announce A Fist Full of Feathers, Brad Kahlhamer’s first exhibition with the gallery which will include new paintings, sculpture and his installation, Bowery Nation, 1985-2012.
Over the course of his practice, Kahlhamer has worked within and between the mediums of painting, drawing, sculpture, installation, performance and music. This profusion of media builds layers of influence that are drawn from physical localities, daily surroundings, aesthetic experiences, collected ephemera and conjured histories that are both real and imagined. Through his paintings and sculpture new universes are built, simultaneously urban-rural and high-low with their own language of symbols drawn from such seemingly disparate sites as Topps Chewing Gum (his former employer), the Lakota Thrifty Mart in Eagle Butte, South Dakota, California skateboard culture, proliferative street art of Bushwick, Brooklyn and Kahlhamer’s personal taxidermy collection, to name only a few. The work has often been described as existing in and representing a “third place” measured by complexity and contradiction, its most salient attributes. Kahlhamer’s unruly methodology can serve as a mirror for a cross section of American cultures and their very consumption while also being a meditation on his own identity and his interest in the “re-wilding” of himself and the contemporary tribal male.
The individual elements of Bowery Nation were first born in 1985 after a visit nearly a decade earlier to the Heard Museum where Kahlhamer encountered their vast collection of Hopi katsina dolls. Signifying supernatural beings, katsina are traditionally used to represent and teach facets of Hopi cosmology. Over years of constructing these dolls using a host of found materials and living and working amongst them in the Lower East Side/Bowery neighborhood of New York, a sort of post-Smithsonian tribe had emerged in the studio. Richard Klein of the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum writes, “The decision to assemble them as a group and finally pursue their exhibition was partially governed by the series having reached the century mark, but also by the fact that, just like Kahlhamer’s experience at the Heard three decades earlier, the power of the individual “dolls” is amplified by their gathering. Kahlhamer’s personal mythology has been made manifest through the truism of strength in numbers.” Kahlhamer is also exploring a correlative tradition, that of the tourist trade. He riffs on the copy of the copy of the copy which melts into ubiquitous symbols and tropes of representation, consumption and the rolling up of the complex and nuanced into a digested monolith. This romanticism is obliterated by what can be a harsh candor in his paintings and the carnivalesque celebration and public procession of Bowery Nation reflecting motley tensions but never defeat.
Brad Kahlhamer was born in Tucson, Arizona and currently lives in New York City. His work has been exhibited extensively in the United States as well as internationally. Bowery Nation was shown at the Nelson Atkins Museum of Art, Missouri, 2013 and the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Connecticut in 2012. It is currently on loan from Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary (TBA21), Vienna, Austria. Recent group exhibitions include One Must Know The Animals, Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, Wisconsin, 2012 and The Old, Weird America: Folk Themes in Contemporary Art, Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, Texas, 2008. He was the recipient of the Joan Mitchell Award, 2006 and the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award in painting, 2001.
Kahlhamer is included in numerous public collections including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Seattle Art Museum, Washington; the Denver Art Museum, Colorado; the Weatherspoon Art Museum, North Carolina; the Milwaukee Art Museum, Wisconsin; the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas and theHood Museum of Art, New Hampshire. He will be included in Musée du Quai Branly’s exhibition The Art and Life of the Plains Indians opening in 2014 and traveling tothe Nelson Atkins Museum of Art, Missouri and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
Concurrently on view at 513 West 20th Street is Odili Donald Odita: This, That, and the Other from October 18th through November 16th.
Upcoming exhibitions at the gallery include Susana Solano: A meitat de camí – Halfway there at both our 20th Street and 24th Street locations opening November 22, 2013 and remaining on view until January 11, 2014.
Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday from 10am to 6pm. For additional information and photographic material please contact the gallery at info@jackshainman.com.
BRAD KAHLHAMER/FORT GOTHAM GIRLS + BOYS CLUB/March 28 – April 26, 2014
BRAD KAHLHAMER/A FIST FULL OF FEATHERS/October 18 – November 16, 2013