other possibilities 2005 - NY

OTHER POSSIBILITIES: NEW WORK BY
ANDREW SCHOULTZ, GREG LAMARCHE,
CRAIG COSTELLO AND ALICIA MCCARTHY
September 10 through October 8, 2005

Track 16 Gallery presents OTHER POSSIBILITIES, an exhibition of new paintings, collages, sculptures, installations, and wall paintings by Andrew Schoultz, Greg Lamarche, Craig Costello, and Alicia McCarthy.

These artists’ early experiences in graffiti and street art continue to inform their work–– each artist in strikingly different ways, redefines and moves beyond typical graffiti forms and iconography by reinventing and breathing new life into the familiar, ordinary, cast-off, or marginal, to create alternate meanings, other possibilities.

Andrew Schoultz (San Francisco) makes large, elaborate wall paintings and installations which in scale and scope, derive from his background in graffiti and public mural projects. Using his own repertoire of iconic images which include elephants, smokestacks, ships, and tornados, he addresses social and political issues. His installations incorporate recyclable materials such as discarded wood panels and scraps, reinforcing his ongoing political critique of society by using the remnants of consumer culture as media for his work. Recently, he executed a site-specific mural for Oracles and Ruminations at the Sara Nightingale Gallery (Watermill, NY) and was included in Lifecycle Analysis at the Intersection for the Arts (San Francisco).

Embracing his graffiti origins, Greg Lamarche (New York) creates small, intricate paper collages focusing on text and fonts. His work combines commercially printed and custom cut letters and words in a profusion of font styles, word fragments, and multiple layers, which combine to form new meanings and associations. For example, his collage Not Free, is comprised of hundreds of pieces of paper printed with the word “free” assembled in such a way to spell out the word “not.” By using objects that are considered disposable, Lamarche’s media, taken from such sources as restaurant delivery menus and magazine subscription cards, comments on societal and monetary values related to art, labor, and commodity. His work is currently featured in the Dreamland Artist Club, a public art project in Coney Island, NY and will be on view in Process and Progress at the McCaig-Welles Gallery (Brooklyn, NY), in November.

Craig Costello (New York) is known for creating and mixing his own ink, “KRINK” a longtime practice which he initially used in graffiti. He currently uses his custom ink to cover a variety of surfaces and spaces both indoor and outdoor with long, sloppy drips of pigment. In outdoor spaces, he takes familiar objects such as a mailbox or a doorway, which he identifies as a minimal pieces of sculpture, and redefines them by using long flowing drips of ink or paint which outline, and rearticulate the space in a way that lends itself both to sculpture and painting. In an indoor, gallery context, his sculptures and paintings are comprised of minimal shapes or sculptures with drips on the surface. Because he creates the surface or sculpture, as opposed to painting on existing outdoor objects, he brings some of his root street sensibility to a more formal arena. Currently his works are the subject of a twelve-page spread in the upcoming September issue of Arkitip magazine.

Alicia McCarthy (San Francisco) uses found materials in her installations and assemblages (stemming from her background in street art), while her paintings are reminiscent of abstract landscapes, composed of many lines forming grids, or arcs of color weaving on top of, and under each other, in an almost textile-like fashion. Her work consists of intentional mishappenings, yet they are uncontrolled, paralleling day to day life, relationships between the living world and its connections or disconnections, and perceiving as opposed to perception. Alicia McCarthy lives and works in Oakland, California and has exhibited her work both locally and internationally and will be part of the University of California, Berkeley, MFA program this fall.