press release
STUDIO10
Watermelon Punch
Caroline Cox, Tim Spelios, Jude Tallichet and Matt Freedman
Opening Reception: Friday, January 5th, 2017 7-9 PM
January 5th - February 4th, 2017
Studio 10 is pleased to present Watermelon Punch, a group show of four artists variously buddies and partners; Caroline Cox, Tim Spelios, Jude Tallichet and Matt Freedman, who have shared a long friendship and history of collaboration. This, however, is their first four person show together.
The initial planning for Watermelon Punch was done on a sweltering afternoon last August on a rooftop in Queens during the total solar eclipse. The four of us peered indirectly at the sky through little camera obscuras Tim had built. We saw not only the glimmering dot of sun, but also the inverted skyline of the nearby Ridgewood neighborhood- trees, streetlights, more rooftops. In the uncanny amber light that filled the air during the time that the moon moved between the earth and the sun. We were swarmed with ideas and images of things blotted out, things upside down. It all seemed pretty interesting. The universe was meandering into and out of a propitious alignment right in front of our bemused eyes and it felt like attention must be paid. The notion of the eclipse as the animating principle for the show appealed to us. More thoughts rolled around in our heads; the celestial display itself, but also the nature of the quotidian DIY mechanism for viewing, the notion of time passing, inversions, conversions, perversions. Somehow, it seemed it would all fit together in some mysterious, miraculous way. We went home and went to work. We had months to go, after all, surely time would take care of everything and the true final nature of the project would reveal itself to us without effort, worry or melodrama.
And of course, none of that happened. We made things we had not anticipated making, we made up things that surprised us, things we thought about because of things we encountered long after the afternoon on the roof. Things that came from other things. Things we saw in the studio. Mistakes, chance operations, ideas that built on ideas that were five steps removed from where we had begun. So what is in the gallery of course, has no relationship to that day on the roof and the total eclipse of the sun, except that the eclipse was the essential start of the thread that spooled out and led to the show that begins on January 5. The pieces in the gallery, some of them at least, were designed in a contrapuntal way, one gesture from one of us leading to another from another of us, but we cannot claim to have ever had much of a plan.
We will put together an improvised collaborative installation at the entrance to the gallery during the weeks leading up to the opening of the exhibition. As we write this we have only the vaguest idea what will be there, though we are thinking that it will be filled with fragments of projects and other ephemera that fascinate and beguile us pulled from the shelves and walls of our studios.
Studios are small, temporary Edens. They are work places but also refuges, never-never lands. Galleries are usually much less so. Many thanks to Larry Greenberg for letting us extend the utopic spaces where we work and think into the world we share with our friends and other visitors.
On February 3rd Spelios, Tallichet, Cox and Freedman will perform together, telling a story with drawings, music and sound effects. The best way to achieve the sound effect of a head cracking open, it has been argued, is to punch a watermelon.
STUDIO10 is located at 56 Bogart Street, Brooklyn.
Gallery hours: Thursday through Sunday 1-6 pm or by appointment.
Contact: (718) 852-4396, www.studio10bogart.com