#proxygallery

GUEST CURATOR: Proxy Gallery Adjacent, Kali Nikitas, Guest Curator, 4 exhibitions total. Theme: Souvenirs. Thanks to all artists/designers who participated, starting on top left: MorcosKey, Lebanon/NYC; Natassa Pappa, Athens; Jan en Randoald, Ghent; Mandujano_Cell, Los Angeles

Through a reworking of flags, maps, national anthems, and foreign languages, Renee Petropoulos has long mined the questions of nationhood and national identity. Her sculptures, painting, performances and installations show how symbols communicate; but she finds miscommunication equally interesting and revealing : what we say and what we hear are usually not in sync, and in that disjunction perhaps we can locate the workings of ideology and the formation of  subjectivity. … more

PROXY Gallery is delighted to present the solo exhibition "Monument 1 - conjugation" by artist Renee Petropoulos. To those who know of Vladimir Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International (1919-20,) Petropoulos’ 2013 sculpture raises the question of an a posteriorireference to a historical artifact: after almost a hundred years we have a full-scale sculpture in a small-scale gallery, recalling a never-built model. This reparative historical gesture propels us to the past and future simultaneously. On the acetate and paper helixes the "empty" signifiers here, there, you are, I am, are engaged in an endless self-reflexivity and relativity, a negotiation between what is perceived and what might be known: Language here is both material and abstract, performatively enacting the way history is made intimate and is always modified by adjustment of perspective and subject position. Here the viewer, unable to circumambulate the work, is forced to consider sculpture, language and history as frontality and fragmentation, almost like a photograph, circling back to the experience of the black-and-white photograph of Tatlin’s model, and calling attention to the inflexions of knowledge in and of history.