WORKS | EXHIBITION IMAGES | PRESS RELEASE | ARTIST PAGE: KENNEDY-CUTLER | FERGUSON
HALSEY MCKAY GALLERY is pleased to present a two-person exhibition of works by David Kennedy Cutler and Elise Ferguson. These artists bring highly inventive and idiosyncratic approaches with materials to their unique interpretations of geometry and abstraction. Ferguson’s paintings and Kennedy-Cutler’s sculptures preserve incidents, actions, undoings, and the myriad transformations that occur above, below and between the visible surface.
Elise Ferguson’s pigmented plaster reliefs hang on the walls of the downstairs gallery. Inspired by Louis Kahn’s uncamouflaged use of cement – with seams showing and irregularities embraced – Ferguson uses what would typically be described as a sculptor’s materials. Plaster is pigmented and troweled on to MDF panels – layer upon layer forming “paintings” that strive towards something cerebral yet physical. The artist’s manipulations reflect her endless fascination with the capabilities and physical limits of materials with equal weight given to the pleasures of creating something resolutely optical: concentric circles, radiating grids and undulating patterns. While abstracted, things often begin to resemble elements of the natural world, a stove top, industrial packaging, construction tools and materials. She occasionally creates illusionist space or a composition that appears representational. This tendency is reflected in the titles – a means of embracing the associative nature of looking, thinking and naming.
As Ferguson’s abstractions give subtle hint to naturalism, Kennedy-Cutler references the specific urban environment where he lives and works in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. Standing as totems on the floor space of the gallery, his sculptures are reactions to his remote industrial neighborhood. Here, pollution and environmental catastrophe confronts the influx of a streamlined gentrification producing an aesthetic muddle. To make these sculptures, he creates molds, lines them with plastic sheeting, pours epoxy resin, then integrates elements ranging from clear and tinted Plexiglas, acrylic printer’s process ink, photographs of oil rainbows on wet asphalt, smashed compact discs, and recycled motor oil. The results are works that call attention to breakages and ruptures of order, geometry, structure, displaced geology, and dislocated cultural artifacts. He seals this slew in an aesthetic of plastic newness, erecting a floating skin of glass to display these incidents. This material allows Kennedy-Cutler to capture the gestures of his process in hardened sculptural form while giving the appearance of things created through seeping, spreading or sedimentation echoing the oil and chemical pollution below his neighborhood. Much like the deckled and imperfect plaster layers of Ferguson’s paintings, these objects form redemptive beauty in their cracks, crags and unkempt edges.
David Kennedy Cutler lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. He has had recent solo exhibitions at Derek Eller Gallery, NY and his work has been included in exhibitions at Kate Werble Gallery, Socrates Sculpture Park, Dieu Donne Papermill, D’Amelio Terras, NY, Nice & Fit, Berlin; Portugal Arte ’10, Lisbon amongst others.
Elise Ferguson lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. She has had recent solo exhibitions with Halsey Mckay Gallery, White Columns, Envoy Enterprises, NY and at Illinois State University. Her works has been included in exhibitions at Luhring Augustine, Team Gallery, Dieu Donne Papermill, The Sculpture Center, Andrew Kreps, CRG Gallery, NY; Fourteen30 Contemporary, Portland; Norwich Galllery, England; Lothringer Dreizen, Munich; amongst others