WORKS | EXHIBITION IMAGES | PRESS RELEASE | ARTIST PAGE: KUO | RAFFERTY
HALSEY MCKAY GALLERY is pleased to present, Friends a two-person exhibition of new work by Sara Greenberger Rafferty and Andrew Kuo. Both artists employ color and design–along with comic strategies–resulting in works that project a sense of awkwardness and vulnerability. Rafferty and Kuo traverse the space around humor that often reflects a darker, perhaps self-conscious daily existence.
Sara Greenberger Rafferty’s new photographic works on large plastic sheets depict a life-size performer overlaid with a variety of shape types that evoke language or quantifiable information, without the benefit of a key. More directly, her “prop” works – the letters H T O & E – are semi-disembodied signs spelling out nothing in particular. Somehow, the connection between language, the body and self presentation becomes foregrounded in this collection. Similarly, Kuo unabashedly dipicts self-presentation though with an introverted approach. The rehearsed polish of the public performance gives way to a more casual tone as Kuo charts the day to day meanderings of his own being. With graphic presicion he takes on his “troubles,” ranging from the fact that “We will never actually meet humans named ‘Al Dente’ ” to if “The after-life is just a re-play of all the times we wished we were dead.” These concerns are then compared to the responses of a comedian and a psychiatrist in detailed, color-coded keys like those implied by Rafferty’s overlaid shapes. Like Rafferty’s efforts, the data of these quips evokes something much more earnest than the snark of a one-liner and much more universal than their individual source.
Sara Greenberger Rafferty has exhibited solo projects at Rachel Uffner Gallery, The Kitchen, MoMA PS1, New York, and The Suburban, Illinois. She has participated in group shows including at the Aspen Art Museum, Colorado, Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase, Gagosian Gallery and the Jewish Museum, New York. Rafferty’s work has been featured and reviewed in The New York Times, The New York Observer, Art in America, Flash Art, Art News and New York Magazine. She received her MFA from Columbia University, her BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and lives and works in Brooklyn.
Andrew Kuo was born in 1977 in Queens, and lives and works in New York. He received his BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1999. Notable past exhibitions include This is Killing Me, Mass MOCA, North Adams, MA, and solo exhibitions at Taxter and Spengeman, Artists Space, New York, SMoCA, Scottsdale, AZ and at Franklin Art Works, Minneapolis, MN. A comprehensive catalogue of the artists work was published by Standard/Damiani in 2010 and is available for purchase. His work will be included in the exhibition catalog for Talk To Me, at MoMA, NY. His charted music and popular culture reviews regularly appear in the New York Times. Kuo has appeared on Chalrlie Rose as well as in The New Yorker, Artforum, Inteview and L’uomo Vogue among others.