HALSEY MCKAY GALLERY

Zohore’s works are best described as visual essays, queer objects that disregard geometry and disobey conventional categorization. Some appearing on walls while others are sculptures and installations, his works draw attention to the poetics of relations between desires of wealth and violence. To create his works, made mostly of Bounty Paper Towels, inkjet and bleach, the artist begins by creating a digital collage consisting mostly of recognizable images of pop culture, art history and urban landscapes. Breaking these images up into equal size rectangles, he prints each rectangle onto a single sheet of paper towel. Cutting and tiling them onto the canvas, he uses bleach in a process that mimics gestures found in action painting to remove layers of colors, revealing texture and adding a dreamlike aesthetic to the constructed reality.

Mining the most immediate and intimate objects found in domestic materiality, Cutler continues to build his investigations into the ephemeral tumult of living and working.  Beginning with a process of inkjet transfer on canvas, he then collages and paints over his imagery, fashioning paintings and sculptures that collapse boundaries between the body and objects that surround, nourish and shelter it. His repetitive motifs of rib cages, trellises, vessels, cleaning products, plants, flowers, food, clothing, shipping crates, tools and domestic furniture weave throughout his disobedient surfaces, undermining the substrates that physically support the work.  His objects, defying photographic practice or studied still life, are frozen moments of the precise breaking point where leaves lap the surfaces of canvases and twigs, chairs, and flowers tear the seams of their containers. His work, like Zohore’s, nods to class-based labor, while projecting a speculative realm untethered to conventional material reality.

Complementing the wall works, the artists will present flower arrangements in vessels. Cutler’s flowers, like the rest of his materials, are synthetic and viral, rupturing from large zipper-clad canvas wine bottles, conjuring personified husks. Zohore’s Primitivisms, 2015–ongoing, a bird of paradise flower is placed intentionally and neatly in an open container of blue Windex. The exotic beauty of the flowers, however, quickly transforms into a tragic drama as they continue to suck up the detergent and slowly turn blue. If Cutler’s flowers are a water leak eventually breaking the ceiling at your dinner party, Zohore’s are the young polite cousin no one suspects is slowly drinking all the Martinis.

–  Yomna Osman

David Kennedy Cutler (b. 1979, Sandgate, VT) is an artist, writer and performer who lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. His practice addresses traces of domesticity; he presents material objects as witnesses of unseen labor and hidden objects. He observes, transfers, and transforms recognizable every day and artistic materials to create installations, paintings, and performances.

Cutler received his BFA from The Rhode Island School of Design in 2001. He has had solo exhibitions at Derek Eller Gallery (NYC), Halsey McKay Gallery (East Hampton, NY), Essex Flowers (NYC), The Centre for Contemporary Art (Tallinn, Estonia) and Nice & Fit (Berlin, Germany). Cutler has performed in various spaces in New York including Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery, Essex Flowers, Printed Matter, Halsey McKay, Derek Eller Gallery, and Flag Art Foundation, and internationally at the Center for Contemporary Arts Estonia, among others. His works are included in the permanent collections of the Wellin Museum at Hamilton College and The RISD Museum, and his artist’s books are included in the libraries of the Whitney Museum and the Brooklyn Museum. He has been reviewed and featured in The New York Times, Artforum, Art in America, The New Yorker and Modern Painter, among others. Cutler is represented by Derek Eller Gallery, NY and Halsey McKay Gallery, East Hampton.