Opening Reception: Saturday May 6, 7pm to 9pm
Second Gallery is pleased to present two installations: And if I only could, I'd make a deal with god, and I'd get him to swap our places, by Aaron Brewer, and False Profit by Michael Mahalchick. Both artists will be in the gallery space for two weeks building and installing their pieces prior to the opening of the exhibition, on Saturday May 6th, from 7 to 9 pm.
Aaron Brewer and Michael Mahalchick will each produce an independent project, though as long time colleagues and friends their projects will interface with one another both conceptually and materially. Brewer and Mahalchick, in different ways, create aesthetic logics born out of the tumultuous relationship between the materiality of the body and that of the physical world: the world of stuff.
Aaron Brewer is an artist, theorist, and curator, who has exhibited widely throughout the United States and Canada. He has contributed essays to numerous exhibition catalogs and is a regular contributor to C Magazine based in Toronto. He is one of the original founders of CANADA, the New York based gallery representing Michael Mahalchick. He will be writing an essay to accompany this show. Aaron Brewer creates environments of bundles, piles, and gatherings of often unidentifiable objects and paint, spray foam and other materials. At first glance, his installations appear to be chaotic and unintentional messes of items and materials, busy to the point of incomprehensibility. Upon further investigation, however, these environments provide a exhilarating terrain of complex and often uncomfortable physical and emotional relations: a chair leg on a piece of folded over foam on a blob of something slimy looking with craft feathers in it, for instance. The power of Aaron Brewer's installations lies in the way in which the material relationships do not operate as symbols or representations of feelings or ideas: the materiality of the work is the emotional and cognitive content of the work. Aaron Brewer's work finds a way to transform a nearly combative and overwhelming relationship to the physicality of everyday life into a mode of address; a way of being with the world that is almost peaceful in its overwhelming complexity. Brewer attended Tyler School of Art and Hampshire College, and lives and works in Los Angeles.
Michael Mahalchick, represented by CANADA, is a sculptor, musician, and performance artist. He has exhibited his sculpture and installation work at numerous galleries and museums in the US and internationally, including The Sculpture Center, PS1, and Andrew Kreps Gallery. Mahalchick uses fabric and fur, discarded clothing, and scraps of unwanted textiles to produce series of sculptures that are wrapped, bundled, stuffed, and piled. Many of Mahalchick's sculptures are unnervingly figurative, though amputated and wrapped to the point of obscurity. Mahalchick's approach to his materials might be said to be loving, in the sense that he, almost childishly reuses the discarded stained, torn, and matted soft materials of everyday life, though it is a lovingness that is neither innocent nor simple. Rather, Mahalchick's sculptures are created in a space of absence, with what is physically left over when someone or something disappears. Mahalchick's creations have a subtely mournful air to them, as well as a sexuality that is always present yet awkwardly hard to approach. His work is marked by a sense of loss and grasping manifested through the preciousness of the ugly and useless, the stuffing of holes, the wrapping of awkward shapes, and the delicate application of beads and other ornamentation, in short, the sincerity with which he approaches the materiality of the world in order to create his objects. Michael Mahalchick attended California Institute of the Arts and Tyler School of Art, and lives and works in New York. False Profit will consist of a series of 13 stuffed-animal sized fabric and beaded sculptures as well as one larger sculpture at human scale. These will be accompanied by a series of photographs of the artist in 13 different "looks."
And if I only could, I'd make a deal with god, and I'd get him to swap our places by Aaron Brewer and False Profit by Michael Mahalchick will be on view from May 6 - June 10, 2006, with an opening reception on Saturday May 6, from 7 to 9 pm. Gallery hours are Wednesday through Saturday, 12 to 6pm. The Distillery. 516 East 2nd Street, South Boston, MA 02127.
W: www.secondgallery.org E: secondgallery@gmail.com T: 617 413 9395