Something We Talked About

Brooke Alexander 59 Wooster Street, NY, NY 10012
212.925.4338 tel., 212.941.9565 fax
info@baeditions.com/www.baeditions.com

Leo Castelli 59 East 79th Street, NY, NY 10021
212.249.4470 tel, 212.249.5220 fax

September 19 - November 23, 2002

Brooke Alexander and Leo Castelli Gallery are proud to announce the opening of a dual-venue exhibition, Something We Talked About, featuring works by John Baldessari, Rita McBride, David Salle, and Lawrence Weiner.

The exhibition's theme refers to the composed sense that each work bears a vague, displaced familiarity to itself. It invokes an awareness of transpired events, or ideas, though we can't quite seem to put our fingers around what that is (or was, or will be). Things, no matter what their roots, are not always logical. Images and objects, once they have become isolated, magnified, and dramatized, tend to create new, unexpected interactions. Something We Talked About explores the soft, gray area in art where a contemporary rejection of Modernism and the foundations of Post-modernism gel. All four artists deal primarily with an altercation of familiarity and form by manipulating some of the most basic tenets of visual representation: context, scale, function, and meaning.

Rita McBride takes machines and industrial structures and turns them into simple, sterile forms. While her "shapes" have become void of purpose, they manage to retain the ability to delicately symbolize their past lives through their basic recognizable qualities. Previously, she has worked with such sources as arcade consoles, ATM machines, and arena bleachers. Here, public parking garages and industrial air ducts become her palette.

Just as McBride denies function to form, Lawrence Weiner denies communication to language. Reducing them to the level of pure text, Weiner takes fragments of sentences, and by playing with their size and scale, simultaneously reveals their weakness to convey and their ability to impact or provoke. Often exploded to an industrial strength scale, Weiner's text installations can be as solid as McBride's metal vents, or as amorphous as the air that travels in them.

John Baldessari re-uses images, sometimes his own, sometimes appropriating them from old movies, advertisements, or photographs you might have found on the walls of your grandmother's house. His works are collections of disparate elements, where each has lost its original voice, but when placed together (like Wiener's voided thoughts), mold themselves into a strange, exciting whole where the visual sum is equal to its parts. In certain ways we know what we see, but what we no longer makes sense. Baldessari pushes us further into creating a reinterpretation by often blocking out (or adding on) with color the central features of many of the individual images. Through his juxtaposition, the mundane becomes not just ironic, but iconic.

David Salle applies layers of de-contextualized images through the most traditional medium of paint on canvas. The sources of Salle's image bank are more ephemeral and dispersed: advertisements mixed with art-history, pornography mingled with still-life. Each painting, through its seemingly random layering of objects and actions, looses its message, or its sensuality, and instead becomes a beautiful, if dyslexic, cauldron of impact.