RICHARD BLOES’s objects generally appear as loosely assembled elements from store-bought self- assembly kits, woodshop scraps, and found performance props that are anachronistically punctuated with the hard edge and movement of a video. In actuality the objects are highly organized sequences of things and stuff that are manipulated by friends and family according to a script by the artist, who documents the action in real time on video.
As the artist noted: “Reading Chair For Don Quixote Reading is a 4.5 min video shot in one continuous take. It is meant to be shown as an installation (in company with the sculpture that was used to make it) or on a monitor (in portrait mode). The piece imagines Don Quixote’s reading chair as a place where actions are separated from the mind, perceptions only realizing themselves in a
crash of physical reality into the windmill. Or as a place where the long shadow of Cubism must be fought, where Cubism is the windmill monster to be attacked. Or where outdated modes/ technologies pile up every day like the old codes of knighthood. The piece is also a place of
interaction between the physical world, the electronic image world, and human motion (in the piece, all objects are moved by a crew of five people). On cut-out strips of typed paper, dangling like a fishing lure in front of a chair with no legs, are the titles of the books about knighthood that Don Quixote read too much of. Many of these books were burned, in the Cervantes’s novel, in an effort to keep Don Quixote sane. They formed the identity/delusions of the ‘knight of the sorrowful face.’”

Richard Bloes was born in Waterloo, Iowa and received an MFA
from the University of Iowa. This will be his seventh exhibition at Feature Inc. The installation was made possible with an Individual Artist Grant, Pollock-Krasner Foundation, Inc., with special thanks to: Charles Addotta, Joel Bacon, Caitlin Driscoll-Bloes, Robert Ingraham, Robert Schefman.

For many years,JENNIFER SIREY has been cultivating bacteria to produce some of the elements of her sculpture. Her most recent water-filled glass tanks are penetrated by bulbous hand-blown glass tubes and as well, irregularly divided up by angled sheets of bacterial growth. On one level the sculpture is a highly aestheticized formal abstraction and on another it is a gnarly investigation into the body. In these particular works, to create the angled sheets, Sirey fills the tank to a predetermined level with a mixture of her mother culture and wine or sake, then tilts the tank so that the surface of the liquid aligns to the armature of small monofilament loops attached to the glass. After a few days, the bacteria Acetobacter (the same bacteria used to convert wine into vinegar) begin to attach to the armature and soon form a skin on the liquid’s surface. Once the membrane reaches the desired thickness, the tank is carefully drained and replaced with water mixed and white vinegar to stabilize the environment. The final piece is alive but in a state of hibernation.

Sirey was born in Brooklyn, New York and received her BFA from the School of Visual Arts, New York, in 1990. This will be her second show at Feature Inc

.> Sirey exhibition images

Upfront hosts a BOBBIE OLIVER painting, Summer Triptych 1 (2012), which veils and reveals the mutability of its development and redevelopment.

Oliver studied at the Center for Creative Studies, Detroit, and St. Alban’s School of Art, England, and lives and works in New York City.

.> Oliver exhibition images

While these recent paintings by David Deutsch appear extremely different from those of the last 25 years, continuity can be seen in their combining of abstraction and representation, the perspective of surveillance or observation, and sense of the impending. With regard to his occasional but notable rotunda paintings, 16 or so painted between 1989 and 2003, the connection is most simply the figure within a container.

These recent paintings are transfers and as such are related to the painting process for David’s plywood paintings from the early 70s. They are painted in acrylic on plastic sheeting, allowed to dry, an appropriately sized canvas is primed with a medium, and the plastic sheeting is placed paint surface down onto the primed canvas, smoothed and let to set for a day or two and then peeled away. The painted image has been absorbed into the medium covered surface of the canvas and the pulled plastic is again clear. This reversal is a distancing process, a device similar to checking out the strength of a painting’s form by looking at it upside down or in a mirror, and as well allows a myriad of seams, creases, ridges, and distressed surfaces that occur during the printing process to undermine the expressionist brush work of the so called painting. These qualities lure us into inspecting the paint application and separate us from the subject matter. Yet once we enter the physical uncertainty of the materiality we find that this alternate universe is indeed embedded in the other.