William Stone

THE PROPOSITION 2 Extra Place New York, NY 10003 | 212-242-0035 | www.theproposition.com

We are very excited to announce the re-location, re-opening and re-invention of The Proposition. The Proposition is now located at 2 Extra Place, East 1st Street between Bowery and 2nd Avenue, the alley behind the historic CBGB’S, steps from the New Museum on the new platinum coast of the Bowery. In its new location, The Proposition will present a series of shows juxtaposing artists shown during its seven years in Chelsea with an exciting group of architecturally and sculptor based furniture designers. We will also explore multi-media artists’ adventures into furniture making and other functional objects with the emphasis on line, process and surface. INAUGURAL SHOW WILLIAM S. STONE | THE ROUGH STUFF JUNE 01 - JULY 11 OPENING RECEPTION: JUNE 1st 6-8 PM Our inaugural show, The Rough Stuff, features veteran New York artist William S. Stone (in co-operation with James Fuentes LLC) and includes a section of the film “Out of Our Minds,” (2009) by Melissa Auf der Maur and Tony Stone, conceived and shot at the Stones’ country residence documenting the felling of majestic pine trees within the framework of “19th century period piece” on their property. Subsequently, these very trees become the material for the whimsical collection of the artist’s “functional” and “non-functional” art objects, which will comprise the objects of our first exhibition. William Stone has been featured in solo exhibitions at James Fuentes LLC, Tom Cugliani Gallery, Emily Harvey Gallery and The Clock Tower/P.S. 1 Center for Contemporary Art, in addition to group exhibitions at The New Museum, Deste Foundation for the Arts, The Aldrich Museum and most recently; Socrates Sculpture Park and Engholm Engelhorn Galerie. Stone is represented by James Fuentes LLC, New York. James Fuentes was the curator for The United States of America vs. Alfredo Martinez at The Proposition in 2003, as well as Survival of the Shittest, featuring work by Brian DeGraw and David Perry at The Proposition in 2004.

Civil unrest

Eva and Franco Mattes

May 15th – June 19 2010

EVA and FRANCO MATTES aka 0100101110101101.ORG

Reality is Overrated

opening reception: Saturday may 15, 6-8 pm

www.postmastersart.com - info online

Postmasters Gallery is pleased to present "Reality is Overrated" by Brooklyn based artists Eva and Franco Mattes aka 0100101110101101.ORG. The exhibition will include several new net-based performances as well as their very first work together, a project that has been kept secret for 14 years. The show will open on May 15th and will be on view until June 19th.

The works in this exhibition engage in charged, high resonance issues of crime, sex, war, and death.

What we see in "Reality is Overrated” is a slow process of disintegration of some of our core beliefs about art and culture: the need for material objects, the authority of institutions, the uniqueness of an artwork and the distinction between reality and simulation. Museums have been mysteriously robbed and art objects become dust gathering, obsolete commodities. In order to get real and spontaneous reactions the artists are looking for their audience outside of traditional art spaces, confronting groups of unaware viewers.

In their work Eva and Franco Mattes manipulate video games and Internet technologies creating a permanent state of insecurity by blurring borders between reality and fiction, art and confrontation, intent and its often unexpected consequences.

For “No Fun” Franco Mattes simulated committing suicide in a public webcam-based chat room. Thousands of random people watched while he was hanging from the ceiling, swinging slowly, for hours. The video documentation of the performance, which was just banned from YouTube, is an unbelievable, at times very disturbing, sequence of reactions: some laugh, some are completely unmoved, some insult the supposed corpse, some take pictures with their mobiles. Notably, out of several thousand people, only one called the police.

In “Freedom” we are faced with a live performance set within the popular first-person shooter videogame “Counter Strike”. Here the artist, Eva Mattes, is refusing to accomplish the basic role of the game: kill the enemy. She instead tries to convince the other players to save her because she is “trying to make an artwork”. The result is the performer being endlessly and brutally killed and abused by the other players.

The artists' earliest work “Stolen Pieces” is shown here for the very first time : over a period of two years (1995-1997) Eva and Franco stole dozens of fragments of works of art - masterpieces by famous artists, such as Kandinsky, Duchamp, Beuys, Rauschenberg, Warhol, and Koons - from the most renowned museums of contemporary art in the United States and in Europe. For 14 years they have never revealed its existence. Besides the fragments themselves, the exhibition features a video, shot with a hidden camera, documenting their last heist. Making a mockery of our belief in the sacred nature of art, this controversial work is an open question: where does the value of a work of art lie? Are objects overrated?

The title of this show refers to the actual human condition in which the perception of reality is more and more filtered by the media. Humanity abandoned reality to live in front of screens, concerned only with media attention disguised as communication, and narcissistically hoping to be the protagonist of this spectacle, while chatting compulsively. For their recent works Eva and Franco went down the dark side of the Internet to meet this humanity.

All the works in this show can also be seen online on the artists’ website.

This is the Matteses third solo exhibition at Postmasters. Their work has also been show at Performa, P.S.1, the Walker Art Center, Manifesta, ARoS Kunstmuseum, The National Art Museum of China, the New Museum and the Venice Biennale. They have been recently invited by Marina Abramovic to perform at Plymouth Art Center, UK. A monograph on their work has just been published by Charta.

Postmasters is open tuesday through saturday between 11 and 6 pm. Please contact Paulina Bebecka or Magdalena Sawon with questions and image requests.

image: Eva and Franco Mattes aka 0100101110101101.ORG No Fun, 2010, online performance 2010, screengrab

upcoming exhibtion:

June 29 - August 7, 2010

Defrosted, a Biography of Walt Disney

ADAM CVIJANOVIC and DAVID HUMPHREY will recount the life of Walt Disney in the form of an exhibition. Paintings, collaborations and sculptures by Cvijanovic and Humphrey (also including some guest appearances with works by other established artists) will be assembled into an installation whose subject travels from Kansas to California to Florida and beyond.

Magdalena Sawon

Postmasters Gallery

459 west 19th street

New York, NY 10011

212-727-3323

www.postmastersart.com

magda@thing.net

Devon Dikeou

179 Canal Street, 2nd Floor

New York, NY 10013






Devon Dikeou : “It’s Déjà vu All Over Again”

May 6 – May 28, 2010




179 CANAL presents "It's Déjà vu All Over Again", an exhibition by Devon Dikeou. The title/quote (a Yogi-ism) originates from Berra witnessing Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris hitting back-to-back home runs in an early 1960’s Yankee’s game. Sports aphorisms aside, the exhibition revisits Dikeou’s multifaceted works as artist, curator, publisher and collector, 1991 though the present.

Never one to settle for stagnation, Dikeou has continuously sought to engage her audience with works that invite viewer participation while questioning the nature of observation from the inside-out and outside-in. In “Takes a Licking, and Keeps on Ticking”, viewers are invited to clock in and out of their tour of the exhibition. Sparking some self-consciousness, viewing time is quantified, recorded and presented publicly. The piece engenders nostalgia and gives the audience a chance to experience rarified social practices, as Dikeou’s work is unmistakably tied to America of yesteryear. In her series “Displaced Denver”, warm color photos capture Denver at street level. We recognize the buildings in their familiar post-war mid-century facades. If that was the future then, the artificial flora and fauna and mirrored planter box that makes up “Cajole” (Oriental Opulence and Tropical Paradise), are relics from their past. This floral arrangement looks as if it was plucked straight from one these building lobbies, with official signage generously elucidating the botanical nomenclature, though are we convinced yet?
“So we Must Keep Apart, You There, I Here, with Just the Door Ajar, That Oceans are, and Prayer, and That Pale Sustenance, Despair”, a functioning summer screen door, divides the exhibition space and on the other side, “What’s Love Got to Do with it: ” zingmagazine 1-21” is installed. Before the first issue of zingmagazine was published in 1995, Devon Dikeou was already addressing cross-pollination, in this ongoing installation in which a selection of the iconic directory boards listing every artist in every artist in every group show she has been in since 1991. This related series appropriately hung within the zingmagazine reading room, lists all the participants that have been published in zingmagazine. Viewers are encouraged to get cozy and reacquaint themselves with past issues. Dikeou’s most recent work “Buddha or Machiavelli”, is a color photo taken of the plaque installed at Mezzogiorno Restaurant reserving a table for the pre-eminent art dealer Ileana Sonnabend. We once again encounter the reverential and paradoxical position of an insider looking in and putting out.

All in all, this is the final show of a really great year here at 179 CANAL and it feels like bases are loaded. Let’s see how far we can hit this one out of the park. We will be closed for summer vacation. Thanks for everything and see you soon.

M.L., NYC, 2010

Charlie Horse

curated by: Catharine Ahearn
(last show)