Not Merely a Diced Onion

MISE EN PLACE

Recess Gallery
467 W Amsterdam Ave
(between 82nd and 83rd Streets)
Upper West Side

recessgallery@gmail.com

Subway: 1, 2, 3 to 86th, 79th Streets

Sascha Braunig, Alana Fitzgerald, Mary Reid Kelley, Sowon Kwon, Eleanor Swordy, Erick Mack, Liana Moskowitz, David Muenzer, Tucker Rae-Grant, Jeffrey Stucker and an unknown artist ca. 1650.

Opening March 6th, 6-10pm

Mise en place is not merely a diced onion, stacks of pappardelle, and a wooden spoon resting by the stove—it is also the very moment of readiness embodied by the placement of these objects.

Similarly, the works in this show resist reduction to either the material qualities that they exhibit or the subjects to which they often refer.

Although the name "still life" suggests inaction—even to that extreme end of activity, death—the paintings in this show instead take on an active task, approaching the still life as a continual process of arrangement and re-arrangement. The artists center their inquiry on textures, objects, and external references.

As simultaneously images of a subject and themselves the object of interest, the still-lifes in this show offer to their viewers the activity of this arrangement—in all its neurotic, pragmatic, and energetic forms—while remaining inextricably bound to its means.