William Powhida Inventory, individual original Powhida™ watercolors, 15 x 15 inch sheets; 18 x 18 inches each, framed
Presence
William Powhida | Patte Loper | Larry Graeber
December 1 to 31, 2019
An end-of-year group Spotlight.
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Ryan Sarah Murphy Yellow Letter 4, 2019, spray paint, acrylic, oil pastel, cardboard collage, pencil on paper, 15 x 11 inches
Holding • Letters
Ryan Sarah Murphy
November 1 to 30, 2019
“I am interested in the psychological underpinnings within spatial forms and the built environment, and how the configuration of architectural elements can be shaped to personify one’s inner experience. There is a seemingly incessant drive to find grounding and placement in a widely untethered space, be it the concrete terrain beneath our feet or the visceral dwellings of the interior self.”
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Ryan Sarah Murphy Note 10, 2019, cardboard, graphite, acrylic on paper, 4.5 x 5.5 inches
Mission • Notes
Ryan Sarah Murphy
October 1 to 31, 2019
“My creative practice is intuitive and process-driven, generated by the found ephemera of my daily experience. The process of collage lies at the foundation of everything I make. The emergent themes I tend to arrive at again and again are all rooted in landscape, where the geometry of the horizon line acts as either a conceptual or physical starting point on the paper.”
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of or by A month of excerpts from Ephemerides on and about Marcel Duchamp and Rrose Sélavy
September 1 to September 30, 2024
A month-long look at excerpts from just one month of Marcel Duchamp: Work and Life / Ephemerides on and about Marcel Duchamp and Rrose Selavy 1887–1968 by Jennifer Gough-Copper and Jacques Caumont (M.I.T. Press in 1993).
To mark the 100th anniversary of the creation of Duchamp's infamous work L.H.O.O.Q. – as well as the 51st anniversary of his death – Platform featured a fascinating look at events from various years in the life of Duchamp – all occurring in the month of September. Entries highlight his chess playing, art dealing, social life, and connections with people such as Brancusi, the Arensbergs, Francis Picabia, and Beatrice Wood among others, with entries ranging from the early 1900s to the late 1960s.
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Donnabelle Casis Untitled (27d-15), 2017, pen and gouache on paper, 16 x 20 inches
Summer
David Willburn | Donnabelle Casis
July 1 to August 31, 2024
Works on paper by two contemporary artists.
David Willburn‘s work has been shown nationally and internationally at venues including Dallas Contemporary (Dallas, TX), San Diego Art Institute (San Diego, CA), University of Art and Design (Helsinki, Finland) Museum of Arts and Design (New York, NY), Union Gallery at University of Wisconsin (Milwaukee, WI), Museum of Contemporary Craft (Portland, OR), and Galleri Urbane (Dallas, TX)
Donnabelle Casis’ work has been included in group and solo exhibitions at Geoffrey Young Gallery, Carroll and Sons Gallery, Andrew Edlin Gallery, ReadyWipe Gallery/Baustein Building, Historic Northampton Museum, Hampden Gallery at the University of Massachusetts, Howard House Contemporary Art, Wing Luke Asian Museum, Henry Art Gallery, Tacoma Art Museum, Bellevue Art Museum, and Center on Contemporary Art (CoCA), among others.
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Patte Loper Laboratory for Other Worlds installation view
Patte Loper Laboratory for Other Worlds
May 1 to June 30, 2025
Laboratory for Other Worlds is an exhibition by Patte Loper on view at The Mattress Factory in Pittsburgh, PA, through March, 2020. The work utilizes painting, drawing, video, installation and performance which inhabits the entire first floor of the Monterey Annex and takes the form of a science fiction film set inspired by broader ideas about social and environmental justice. The immersive installation intertwines hand-built structures and sculptures made from humble materials with painting, video, and sound powered in part by solar panel technology. The installation is intuitive and psychological with a muted palette standing in contrast to the imaginative forms, lively scenarios, and shifting scales at play. The format of a lab allows for the possibility of failure as well as for many things to be happening at once. Viewers will be invited to find their own connections between conceptual themes and visual elements.
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William Powhida George Condo, LA London, gouache on paper, 15 x 15 inch sheet, 18 x 18 inches framed
William Powhida INVENTORY
April 1 to 31, 2019
What happens when you produce too much art? Over the last two years, artist William Powhida has produced nearly 200 watercolor paintings of Artforum advertisements to create a visual timeline of The Contemporary, a period of art history from 2000 — 2025 driven by the growth and bifurcation of the art market. Over the course of two exhibitions and five art fairs, the artist has sold many of the works. And yet, the artist is currently sitting in his basement studio in Brooklyn with boxes of actual and speculative Artforum watercolors, thinking about one the most basic conditions of contemporary art, storage. In a very real and uncomfortable way, the artist is confronting, and confronted by, the massive overproduction of contemporary art in a market with far more producers (artists) than consumers (collectors) that has led to most art living out human lifespans in climate-controlled warehouses that spread radially out from cities like New York and Los Angeles into the suburbs.
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Larry Graeber July J, 2018, collage, colored pencil, felt tip pen on paper, on 13 x 13 inch Classic Crest Cover smooth solar white
Larry Graeber Works on Paper
March 1 to 31, 2019
“After many years of practice I trust a degree of empathy and understanding have found lodging in me. I am intrigued with the idea of approximations, even approximations of other approximations. I see this all the time as we relate one thing or another to each other.
“Though a work of mine may start with an initial idea I am always certain it is going to change, evolve and go through permutations that may or may not resemble the initial idea. It's exactly this phenomena, this discovery that intrigues me. This makes my responsibility one of crafting work as confidently and coherently as possible, so when viewed it can be accessible; intuitively and subjectively understood.
“Besides being autonomous as works in their own right, there are moments when they may contribute to other work such as sculpture, paintings, or other drawings, something I do with everything I make.
“The figure has always been important to me, but it hadn't been a part of my vocabulary for a while until sometime last year. There seems to be a psychological component that the numerous eyes imply and question, even challenging the viewer, as to say, ‘I'm looking back at you, what do you see in me?’”
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Ross Sawyers IMG_10298, 2018, archival inkjet print, 22 x 33 inches, edition of 5
Ross Sawyers The future isn’t what it used to be
January 1 to February 28, 2025
“The world has shrunk to the size of this room for him, and for as long as it takes him to understand it, he must stay where he is. Only one thing is certain: he cannot be anywhere until he is here. And if he does not manage to find this place, it would be absurd for him to think of looking for another.”
—from The Invention of Solitude, by Paul Auster
Constructing models, then viewing them through the camera, allows Ross Sawyers to exaggerate and over-state the observations of his surroundings. The environments depicted in the works are close to the actual world, but the artist deliberately refuses to make accurate copies of reality in order to surprise us with environments of the unexpected.