Blake Rayne
01 May - 19 Jun 2016
© Blake Rayne
These Pellets Here This Powder There
Miguel Abreu Gallery, New York, 2016
Installation view
These Pellets Here This Powder There
Miguel Abreu Gallery, New York, 2016
Installation view
BLAKE RAYNE
These Pellets Here This Powder There
1 May – 19 June 2016
Miguel Abreu Gallery is pleased to announce the opening, on Sunday, May 1st, of These Pellets Here This Powder There, Blake Rayne’s fifth solo exhibition at the gallery. On view at our 36 Orchard Street space, the show is comprised of the following:
3/4 inch wide steel banding designed to be used to secure crates to their pallets during overseas shipments is here unspooled from its coil and employed to form a drawing in the space, made from the front to the back of the gallery. Once established, this drawingis held together by paperclips and compressed into a frame that shares a dimension with the series of paintings that adorn the walls.
A group of 60 x 45 inch paintings are the result of asimilar steel banding drawing, albeit one produced in Rayne’s current Navy Yard studio. The banding was again compressed within a temporary frame around the edges of the paintings and utilized as a soft stencil to create a white looping line lightly dusted with aerated acrylic paint in layers of various colors. The paperclips that initially held the banding together were released to allow for expansion into final shape of each of the line compositions. They now appear as silhouettes, while 8 1/2 x 11 inch US letter-sized portions of the white canvas are left exposed, containingshort texts traced in graphite.
Two large 8 1/2 x 11 foot acrylic polymer and pigment paintings that evoke the endpapers that bind a book’s cover to its content bracket the smaller paintings and function within the exhibition’s scenography as quasi-backdrops against which the steel banding and gallery staff are positioned
The gallery desk, having been rotated 90o and moved from its usual position to the adjacent wall, such that it appears to be a pier extending out into the gallery, is covered by a sheet of thick glass, straddling the divide between a museum vitrine on the one hand, and, on the other, a bar.
The name of the exhibition, spelled out in Helvetica, is painted in glossy acrylic polymer on the gallery wall with the use of a vinyl stencil, disappearing into the wall and visible only in raking light.
The gallery shelves, cleared of most of their content, will display several copies of Rayne’s Gangs of New York City artist’s book zip tied together so that only one copy is perusable. The book itself juxtaposes historical images of New York City police uniforms with drawings made with the fat Rayne collected from his semi-regular pig roasts at his former studio.
A looping 6 minute film, transferred from video to 16mm, will project against the wall. Entitled La Libertad, after the municipality on the coast of El Salvador where it was shot, the film depicts a sounder of pigs at the beach, eating clams.
For Rayne, painting is not only to be defined through its material components, it also existsas a fleetingsign that requires testing, stretching,and constant reassessment so as to remain alive in permanently renewed cultural circumstances. Taken together, the works in this compact exhibition, which expand from drawing to sculpture, performance to painting, and film to scenography, demonstrate Rayne’s ambivalent, constantly reimagined and dynamic relationship towards the medium of painting, while also recalling the constituent parts of the gallery’s inaugural exhibition ten years ago, Empedocles/Hölderlin, Cézanne/Gasquet, Straub/Huillet, Dominique Païni & Blake Rayne: two films, one text & paintings.
Blake Rayne, born in Lewes, Delaware in 1969, lives and works in New York. He studied at the California Institute of the Arts, received a fellowship from the American Acadamy in Berlin (2010), and has taught at Columbia University’s School of Visual Arts. Recent one-person exhibitions of Rayne’s work include Peaceful Photographers (Campoli Presti, London and Paris, 2015), Warmilk (Mendes Wood, São Paolo, 2014), On Fridays We Have Half Days (Miguel Abreu Gallery, New York, 2014), Blake Rayne (1301PE, 2013), Wild Country(Campoli Presti, London, 2012), Blake Rayne (Formalist Sidewalk Poetry Club, Miami Beach, 2011), Shade Subscription (Capitain Petzel Gallery, Berlin, 2011), Coastal Graphics (Sutton Lane, Paris, 2011), and Folder and Application (Miguel Abreu Gallery, New York, 2010). Hehas also been featured in group exhibitions such as PLIAGE/FOLD(Gagosian Gallery, London, 2014) Chat Jet: Painting the Medium(Künstlerhaus, Graz, 2013), System Analysis (Langen Foundation, Neuss, 2011) and New York to London and Back: The Medium of Contingency (Thomas Dane Gallery, London, 2011), as well as Bergen Kunsthall, The Kitchen, Sculpture Center, Artists Space, Reena Spaulings, Greene Naftali, and American Fine Arts. Rayne will have his first institutional solo exhibition at the Blaffer Art Museum in Houston, Texas in the autumn of 2016. His work is held in the collectionsof the Museum of Modern Art, Collection FRAC Poitou-Charentes, Portland Museum of Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, Films and Their Sites, is simultaneously on view at 88 Eldridge Street.
These Pellets Here This Powder There
1 May – 19 June 2016
Miguel Abreu Gallery is pleased to announce the opening, on Sunday, May 1st, of These Pellets Here This Powder There, Blake Rayne’s fifth solo exhibition at the gallery. On view at our 36 Orchard Street space, the show is comprised of the following:
3/4 inch wide steel banding designed to be used to secure crates to their pallets during overseas shipments is here unspooled from its coil and employed to form a drawing in the space, made from the front to the back of the gallery. Once established, this drawingis held together by paperclips and compressed into a frame that shares a dimension with the series of paintings that adorn the walls.
A group of 60 x 45 inch paintings are the result of asimilar steel banding drawing, albeit one produced in Rayne’s current Navy Yard studio. The banding was again compressed within a temporary frame around the edges of the paintings and utilized as a soft stencil to create a white looping line lightly dusted with aerated acrylic paint in layers of various colors. The paperclips that initially held the banding together were released to allow for expansion into final shape of each of the line compositions. They now appear as silhouettes, while 8 1/2 x 11 inch US letter-sized portions of the white canvas are left exposed, containingshort texts traced in graphite.
Two large 8 1/2 x 11 foot acrylic polymer and pigment paintings that evoke the endpapers that bind a book’s cover to its content bracket the smaller paintings and function within the exhibition’s scenography as quasi-backdrops against which the steel banding and gallery staff are positioned
The gallery desk, having been rotated 90o and moved from its usual position to the adjacent wall, such that it appears to be a pier extending out into the gallery, is covered by a sheet of thick glass, straddling the divide between a museum vitrine on the one hand, and, on the other, a bar.
The name of the exhibition, spelled out in Helvetica, is painted in glossy acrylic polymer on the gallery wall with the use of a vinyl stencil, disappearing into the wall and visible only in raking light.
The gallery shelves, cleared of most of their content, will display several copies of Rayne’s Gangs of New York City artist’s book zip tied together so that only one copy is perusable. The book itself juxtaposes historical images of New York City police uniforms with drawings made with the fat Rayne collected from his semi-regular pig roasts at his former studio.
A looping 6 minute film, transferred from video to 16mm, will project against the wall. Entitled La Libertad, after the municipality on the coast of El Salvador where it was shot, the film depicts a sounder of pigs at the beach, eating clams.
For Rayne, painting is not only to be defined through its material components, it also existsas a fleetingsign that requires testing, stretching,and constant reassessment so as to remain alive in permanently renewed cultural circumstances. Taken together, the works in this compact exhibition, which expand from drawing to sculpture, performance to painting, and film to scenography, demonstrate Rayne’s ambivalent, constantly reimagined and dynamic relationship towards the medium of painting, while also recalling the constituent parts of the gallery’s inaugural exhibition ten years ago, Empedocles/Hölderlin, Cézanne/Gasquet, Straub/Huillet, Dominique Païni & Blake Rayne: two films, one text & paintings.
Blake Rayne, born in Lewes, Delaware in 1969, lives and works in New York. He studied at the California Institute of the Arts, received a fellowship from the American Acadamy in Berlin (2010), and has taught at Columbia University’s School of Visual Arts. Recent one-person exhibitions of Rayne’s work include Peaceful Photographers (Campoli Presti, London and Paris, 2015), Warmilk (Mendes Wood, São Paolo, 2014), On Fridays We Have Half Days (Miguel Abreu Gallery, New York, 2014), Blake Rayne (1301PE, 2013), Wild Country(Campoli Presti, London, 2012), Blake Rayne (Formalist Sidewalk Poetry Club, Miami Beach, 2011), Shade Subscription (Capitain Petzel Gallery, Berlin, 2011), Coastal Graphics (Sutton Lane, Paris, 2011), and Folder and Application (Miguel Abreu Gallery, New York, 2010). Hehas also been featured in group exhibitions such as PLIAGE/FOLD(Gagosian Gallery, London, 2014) Chat Jet: Painting the Medium(Künstlerhaus, Graz, 2013), System Analysis (Langen Foundation, Neuss, 2011) and New York to London and Back: The Medium of Contingency (Thomas Dane Gallery, London, 2011), as well as Bergen Kunsthall, The Kitchen, Sculpture Center, Artists Space, Reena Spaulings, Greene Naftali, and American Fine Arts. Rayne will have his first institutional solo exhibition at the Blaffer Art Museum in Houston, Texas in the autumn of 2016. His work is held in the collectionsof the Museum of Modern Art, Collection FRAC Poitou-Charentes, Portland Museum of Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, Films and Their Sites, is simultaneously on view at 88 Eldridge Street.