Installation View, Taken by Zoe Zabor for Art Observed
Mark Fletcher has opened his doors to The Still House Group, a mixed media Brooklyn collective exhibiting their first group show since 2010. The installation features paintings and sculptures by Isaac Brest, Nick Darmstaedter, Alex Da Corte, Louis Eisner, Jack Greer, Brendan Lynch, Dylan Lynch, Alex Perweiler, and Zachary Susskind and runs through July 27 at 24 Washington Square North.
Installation View, Courtesy of The Still House Group
Nick Darmstaedter, ‘Looking for an Egg’ (taken by Zoe Zabor)
Dylan Lynch, ‘Chain Gang’ (taken by Zoe Zabor)
Here Comes is an exercise in subversion, the space’s luxurious façade home to a microcosm of intense color and scattershot innovation. The exhibition is staged in a Greenwich Village brownstone, surrounded by private residences that have suddenly found an art gallery in their midst. The works themselves are alternately sculptural (a teetering folding chair balances above the heads of gallery-goers, 20 cinder blocks lean against one another on the floor) and abstract swaths of color, impressionist smears highlighted by Da Corte’s dreamy triptych “Loveless” and Louis Eisner’s “Yellow Right Turn.”
Alex Da Corte, ‘Loveless’ (remaining photographs courtesy of The Still House Group)
Nick Darmstaedter, ‘Cock & Endless Balls’
Louis Eisner, ‘Yellow Right Turn’
They are spattered about Fletcher’s space with an eye towards the inaccessible, hiding canvases between nooks and crannies and disrupting the natural walkways of the space. The processes behind Still House’s pieces operate in much the same way: what passes for paint at a glance may actually be shampoo (Da Corte’s “Loveless”), the consumerist material repurposed for its viscous and ever-changing texture. Eisner described the underlying theme of the show as an exercise in “movement and singular gestures that have been refined over the last couple years that we’ve been working together…iconic, gestural pieces that posit objects as sculptures frozen in space.” These sentiments are further echoed between pieces like Alex Perweiler’s “Chameleon,” created using the chemical elements of the darkroom—save for that last step, to be fixed—and Zachary Susskind’s “Peripheral Influence”, a rubber hose hanging from a hook that might take any shape. This approach allows the work to float, shift and adapt—to be something undetermined—a breathing space not often afforded so appropriately.
Zachary Susskind, ‘Peripheral Influence’
Brendan Lynch, ‘GQ (Kate Upton)’
Zachary Susskind, ‘Small Chances’
Eisner posits the show and its title as an arrival, an open-ended announcement of the group’s ability to cross-examine the various mediums explored throughout “Here Comes.” More than anything else, however, it showcases Still House’s ability to captures the ephemeral quality of a moment in movement. Seen once, the exhibition offers only a snapshot of the larger installation. By the same time tomorrow, however imperceptibly, the moment will have passed.
—G. Corrigan
Related Links:
Still House [Website]
Still House [Tumblr]
Mark Fletcher [Website]
Riffraff Revisited [NYTimes]
Artifacts: Young at Art [NYTimes]
The Still House Group Presents HERE COMES Exhibition Preview [Broadway World]
Tight-Knit Brooklyn Artist Collective The Still House Group on Forging an Alternative Art Identity [ArtInfo]
Young Brooklyn artists present work near Washington Square Park [Examiner]
