Joseph Grigely
26 Oct - 01 Dec 2012
JOSEPH GRIGELY
Remains
26 October - 1 December 2012
A scrap of paper, discarded. A pair of buckets, turned upside-down. A pot-belly stove from an ice-fishing shanty. An empty storage rack. A bulletin board, at one moment covered with announcements and posters, at another moment empty of everything but staples and pins and bits of tattered paper. A photograph of someone singing from the New York Times.
These are the remains of human agency - and the inimitable ways we leave behind traces of our movement through daily life. The remains that constitute Grigely's Remains are not the actualized objects that are left behind; rather, these objects are unmade and remade, and become reified extensions of their previous reality. Captions have been removed; colors have been changed; wood and cast iron have been replaced with crystal urethane. They were once useful objects--the papers carried conversations, the buckets carried paint, the stove produced heat, the storage rack held paintings, the newspaper conveyed timely information--but now their usefulness has transpired into a sort of uselessness; they have become, like the elements of classical still-life paintings, a part of a world ignored.
Joseph Grigely (b 1956, lives and works in Chicago) has exhibited extensively in Europe and the US. His work is in collections that include the Tate Modern, London; Kunstmuseum, Bern; SMAK, Ghent; the Whitney Museum of American Art; and the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Recent exhibitions include the Centre Pompidou, Metz; CAPC, Bordeaux; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Leipzig; the Architectural Association, London; and the Graham Foundation, Chicago. In 2007 the Baltimore Contemporary and Tang Museum published a monograph on his work, Joseph Grigely: St. Cecilia. Grigely’s books include Textualterity: Art, Theory, and Textual Criticism (1995), Conversation Pieces (1998) Blueberry Surprise (2006), and Exhibition Prosthetics (2010).
Remains
26 October - 1 December 2012
A scrap of paper, discarded. A pair of buckets, turned upside-down. A pot-belly stove from an ice-fishing shanty. An empty storage rack. A bulletin board, at one moment covered with announcements and posters, at another moment empty of everything but staples and pins and bits of tattered paper. A photograph of someone singing from the New York Times.
These are the remains of human agency - and the inimitable ways we leave behind traces of our movement through daily life. The remains that constitute Grigely's Remains are not the actualized objects that are left behind; rather, these objects are unmade and remade, and become reified extensions of their previous reality. Captions have been removed; colors have been changed; wood and cast iron have been replaced with crystal urethane. They were once useful objects--the papers carried conversations, the buckets carried paint, the stove produced heat, the storage rack held paintings, the newspaper conveyed timely information--but now their usefulness has transpired into a sort of uselessness; they have become, like the elements of classical still-life paintings, a part of a world ignored.
Joseph Grigely (b 1956, lives and works in Chicago) has exhibited extensively in Europe and the US. His work is in collections that include the Tate Modern, London; Kunstmuseum, Bern; SMAK, Ghent; the Whitney Museum of American Art; and the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Recent exhibitions include the Centre Pompidou, Metz; CAPC, Bordeaux; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Leipzig; the Architectural Association, London; and the Graham Foundation, Chicago. In 2007 the Baltimore Contemporary and Tang Museum published a monograph on his work, Joseph Grigely: St. Cecilia. Grigely’s books include Textualterity: Art, Theory, and Textual Criticism (1995), Conversation Pieces (1998) Blueberry Surprise (2006), and Exhibition Prosthetics (2010).