WITNESS @ Minus Space Jan13-Feb 25, 2012

MINUS SPACE is delighted to announce the exhibition Carrie Pollack: Witness. This is the Brooklyn-based artist’s first solo exhibition in New York and it will feature a suite of new paintings consisting of digital prints on linen.

Carrie Pollack describes her work as “a catalog of her memories”. In it she examines what we as individuals consciously or unconsciously choose to remember, and how our memories of people, places, and events degrade and change over time. Begun after the death of her father in 2009, Pollack’s new paintings are both poetic and existential, and they investigate the notions of permanence and impermanence, as well as uncertainty and contradiction. She deliberately intends her paintings to function “more as conversations than as statements”. Her imagery can often appear both familiar and unknown at the same time spanning both abstraction and representation.

The source materials of Pollack’s new paintings can be found in long meditative walks she takes daily with her dog around her Greenpoint, Brooklyn neighborhood. She carries her camera with her religiously, which she uses as a research tool to record the fleeting nature of her immediate environment. Each day Pollack takes dozens of photographs, which as of late have focused on deteriorating advertising posters, faded graffiti tags, vacant lots, worn textiles, and the fleeting quality of the sky, as well as other elements in transition and flux.

Pollack in turn organizes her photographs – now numbering in the thousands – into several distinct categories: posters, skies, newspapers, and textiles, among others. She spends weeks pouring over her images, intuitively arranging and rearranging them, looking for shared relationships between them. Once she identifies an image of essential interest, Pollack reduces it down to gray-scale in Photoshop, occasionally adjusting its contrast if needed to bring the image into a neutral state. She then prints upwards of one hundred test images with her large-format printer onto a wide array of supports, including newsprint, paper, canvas, and linen. The printing process is intentionally laden with glitches and hiccups, which she readily embraces. She remarks that the technology “adds its own interpretation of the image”, which reflects the way one’s mind continually tries to understand, interpret, and find meaning in the past, present, and future.

In the concluding steps of her process, Pollack prints a final image onto linen in a size that is unequal – sometimes larger, sometimes smaller – to the dimensions of the painting stretcher that will support it. As a result, the printed image often appears misaligned at first glance. Sometimes an image will wrap around the sides of the stretcher bars and onto the back the painting. Other times an image will be completely isolated within a much larger field of raw linen on the surface of the painting. These choices starkly contrast the digital quality of the image with the physical materiality of the painting itself, which directly parallels and exemplifies the complexity of memory.

Review: “Between This Light and That Space”
A group show in which less serves up a whole lot of more. By Sarah Schmerler

Summer group shows. Have you noticed how 90 percent of them include too much work? Enter Minus Space, and you’ll see how hot-weather curating ought to be done: with a philosophy of less is more. Douglas Melini, an abstract painter with an eye for weird confluences of geometry, texture and pattern, has picked 11 works by seven artists. His selections are as intuitive as they are spot-on, and the space practically hums with a soft, yet satisfying, optical buzz.

Installation artist Elana Herzog surprises by offering discrete, stand-alone works. One of the smallest features a shape that looks like the African continent, festooned with fluffy mountain ranges made of fabric. In Palma Blank’s Grey, Purple Diagonals with Yellow Cut-Out, shapes seem to magically float and shift from foreground to background. Michelle Grabner employs spray-on flocking and enamel paint to achieve one X-shaped composition—a weirdly compelling duel between fuzzy blanket and hard grid. Carrie Pollack steals the show, quietly, with a b&w digital print on canvas of a subject as simple as the sky. Meanwhile, hanging from the ceiling’s center is a gently rotating mirrored mobile by Anne Eastman. It further reflects and refracts everything in this already trippy show.

Did we mention that women artists make up the entire exhibit? That’s a rebalance more male curators should take notice of.

Between This Light and That and Space, Curated by Douglas Meilni, MINUS SPACE, Brooklyn, NY

A group exhibition curated by Brooklyn painter Douglas Melini, featuring seven artists reconstructing space: Tisch Abelow, Palma Blank, Anne Eastman, Michelle Grabner, Elana Herzog, Carrie Pollack, and Tamara Zahaykevich.

June 25 – July 30, 2011
Opening: Saturday, June 25, 3-6pm

MINUS SPACE
98 4th Street, Room 204 (Buzzer #28), Brooklyn, NY 11231
between Hoyt + Bond | Carroll Gardens / Gowanus
Hours: Fridays & Saturdays, 12-6pm, and by appointment

Larissa Bates, Gina Beavers, Elizabeth Blomster, Patrick Brennan, Sherri Caudell Brennan, Ned Colclough, Gianna Commito, Sarah Dornner, Jaime Gecker, Jesse Hamerman, Ezra Johnson, Denise Kupferschmidt, Eddie Martinez, Sam Moyer, Carrie Pollack, Mark Schubert, Ned Vena, JD Walsh