Opens August 9th, with reception for the artist from 6 to 8 pm. Exhibition on view through Sept. 15th

Adam McEwen: Chicken or Beef?

Adam McEwen’s work is concerned with revitalizing our senses by drawing attention to the pervasive dullness of our usual visual experience. He works in a peripatetic variety of media, but the sense of déja vu is his consistent throughout. The more familiar the object the better it serves as a handy trope for re-awakening perception. The work combines a Pop sensibility with a wry sense of humor. His series of obituaries celebrating the lives of (still living) individuals like Kate Moss and Richard Prince brought him wide recognition and scrutiny at the 2006 Whitney Biennial. These darkly humorous works play off of celebrity culture and call attention to the usually overlooked codes that are embedded within conventional mass media, while invoking tragic mortality and its attendant glamour in a context disassociated from actual reality.

Contexts and concepts aside, McEwen’s work serves to reconnect us with the objects we are viewing. He is working to overcome a prevailing numbness. The door signs, text messages, sound bites and other mundane objects he throws before us are quickened into new life by being cast outside their conventional roles. The patina of cultural reference many of his works hold – allusions to other artists and artworks – stalls somewhat as the pieces break any fluid connection with predecessors. Text works that deliberately repeat themselves sound like stuttering versions of Ruschas or Weiners. Sculptured halogen lightbulbs invoke work by Jasper Johns but insist upon their status as a halogen bulb, i.e. longer lasting, requiring less juice. The graphite material which makes up the sculptured pieces in this show might just as easily have been used to make a drawing or an image of what is presented. Eschewing one form of conventional illusion-making it serves to “become” the object. Or rather something like the invoked object. And really, using graphite to draft a contemporary text message just does not compute.

Adam McEwen was born in Great Britain. He took a B.A. at Oxford in English Literature before attending the California Institute of the Arts at Valencia, CA. He has written on the arts for Frieze magazine and has worked as curator of several shows, notably “Beneath the Underdog” at Gagosian Gallery NY in 2007 with Nate Lowman. His work has been shown in numerous group and solo exhibitions including at the Whitney Museum, NYC, PS1 LIC, and the Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery NYC.  He lives and works in New York City.