Trade of the Season (High Noon Edition)
June 23 - August 7
High Noon in NYC and MARQUEE PROJECTS in Bellport LI, are delighted to announce their collaboration on a tandem, gallery-exchange exhibition titled Trade of the Season. High Noon is presenting artists from their roster and community at MARQUEE PROJECTS from May 27 to June 26. In turn, MARQUEE PROJECTS will be presenting works at High Noon from June 23 to August 7 by Daniel Bruttig, Fukuko Harris, Emily Blair Quinn, John Perreault, Mark Van Wagner, Michael Benoit, Larry Wolhandler, and Taylor A. White.
Both galleries were founded in 2017. Through a robust and friendly dialogue over several years, they have recognized a shared approach to programs based in material-based work and in the growth of emerging and mid-career artists. More importantly, both galleries discovered a mutual, intrinsic philosophy that support of the arts is essential for an evolving society. MARQUEE PROJECTS and High Noon are committed to fostering the idea of respectful, collaborative, non-competitive relationships between smaller galleries, focusing on the artist rather than on marketplace rivalry. The benefits will be myriad, especially providing under-recognized artists greater access to a broader audience.
Michelle Benoit sculpts elegant, shard-like objects from recycled and reclaimed materials such as Lucite, wood, paints, and mixed media, which are cut, re-cut, assembled, stacked, and then laminated together. Coalescing into strata of transparency, the pieces reveal both the process of their creation and their optical depth, generating continually shifting interactions with surrounding light.
Inspired by his childhood in rural Wisconsin, Daniel Bruttig builds sly, “crafty” objects that hover between sculpture and painting, and between high and low art. Through intensive material investigation, his abstract assemblages may include thickly impastoed cuckoo clocks, steel wool, thermoplastic adhesive, hot glue, PVC lanyard string, and melted Crayola.
Fukuko Harris's deeply considered sculptures have long explored the possibilities of form and mass in ways that appear spontaneous – ranging from fanciful, Dr. Seuss-like wiry assemblages to more solid pieces suggest a gleeful child-like discovery of the delights of Play-Doh, paint, and mark-making. Her use of a wide array of repurposed material invents objects that attain their own improvised identities: vibrant, organic blooms springing up in a garden of the imagination.
Throughout his illustrious career, the late John Perreault was known as a poet, artist, performer, curator, museum director, teacher, and most notably as an art critic for The Village Voice, Artforum, ARTnews, and other publications. With a deep and thorough knowledge of art history, Perreault was able to distill all that he had observed into conceptually vibrant works. His output knew no bounds and he ventured into a plethora of untraditional media and styles. The selection of artworks presented in this exhibition are from his Scratch series, made of white acrylic paint applied to insulation panels.
Emily Blair Quinn molds, photographs, then paints glistening female figurines in enigmatic states of transition and/or quiet distress. Referencing repressive domesticity, cinematic close-ups, and Alice In Wonderland-like distortions in scale, her dramatis personae deftly inhabit an ironic and brightly hued theatre of unease.
Mark Van Wagner’s sculptures reference and combine various archeological, architectural, and anthropomorphic characteristics. Citing sand to be the most literal medium with which to capture material decomposition, he applies natural and pigmented sands from around the world onto his layered-relief recycled cardboard boxes. These modular pieces often depict moments of impact and reverberations of force; the implications of destruction are present, but so are humor and restoration.
Larry Wolhandler’s paintings investigate and extrapolate the possibilities of the grid, combining luxurious and subtle color, a soft, sanded-down tactility, and a nod to formalism, architecture, and systems represented in botanical prints. Often made with paint from the remainder aisle of Home Depot, these slowly produced pieces offer special regard to elements of accident, erasure, and layers of process.
Bombarding himself with (and commenting on) contemporary media, Taylor Anton White creates irregularly shaped painting-assemblages that incorporate sewn and upholstered canvas, unrestrained gestural work, and vastly disparate mediums not limited to cardboard, plastics, spray paint, charcoal, recycled artwork, and Post-it Notes. These materials collide with juxtaposed text, elements of landscape, and instructional graphics— sometimes all within a single work.