11–14 March, 2005
Pier 92, Booth 117

The Catriona Jeffries Gallery is pleased to be returning to the seventh annual Armory Show. The Gallery will present a new configuration of current works which together could be seen to uncover the cultural props and scaffolding that underpin an encounter with the sublime.

Ian Wallace, in his photo-based work, Construction Site, L.A., depicts the construction of Frank Gehry's Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles and exposes the social incubation of this cultural landmark. Where Wallace critiques the modernist aspirations that drive monumental architecture, Myfanwy MacLeod deflates conventions of artistic mastery and heroism by archly pairing bucolic drawings of 19th century artists in their studios with quotations from the 1989 volume, Anecdotes of Modern Art. A large Calderesque metal mobile by Damian Moppett bears ceramics made by the artist, interrogating modernist distinctions between craft and fine art, process and product. Brian Jungen precisely inscribes mass-produced baseball bats with an autocad-based mechanical carver and reconfigures Nike status symbols into Prototypes for New Understanding.

Ron Terada, Kevin Schmidt and Geoffrey Farmer each renovate existing cultural models. Geoffrey Farmer's work, In the beginning the end often looks like this, engulfed in stillness, immobile and ultimately in the final version, haunted, meticulously piles up a hoard of luminescent research images and pristine hard-drive trash. By reproducing the neon sign from one of Big Star's signature record albums, Ron Terada attracts and refracts the connotations and cult-status of the Memphis-based band. Also mixing music with ironic distance, Kevin Schmidt's video, Long Beach Led Zep, values the beach as a lasting public realm and points to the arbitrary nature of transcendence.
Alex Morrison and Germaine Koh actively engage with what is discarded in the course of daily life. Morrison's Every House I've Ever Lived In, Drawn from Memory continually redefines the transient domestic spaces of the artist's life. Likewise, Koh's seductive and unsettling Fête also flaunts a personal register of time—in the form of rich, celebratory swags of the artist's hair accumulated from her successive haircuts. Made from floor-dust and adhesive, Koh's second work, Roll, amasses the detritus of every space in which it is exhibited—thus minutely adding the Armory visitor into its imperceptible but indisputably expanding chronicle.


Jessie Caryl