"Murder Letters" is a group exhibition featuring eleven prominent young New Yorkbased artists: Carol Bove, Dan Colen, Gardar Eide Einarsson, Hanna Liden, Nate Lowman, Adam McEwen, Josh Smith, Dash Snow, Agathe Snow, Banks Violette, and Aaron Young.
A disabused and/or dissolute spirit courses is at play in many cases. The mise-en-scene of "Murders Letters" is a New York City of the mind, a real-imaginary site where past and present, fact and fiction, ceaselessly collide and are recombined in fruitful, at times perverse configurations. Imagine fancy people in scuzzy clubs, scuzzy people in fancy clubs, dirty rich streets, Abstract-Expressionist obsessional neuroses, etc.
Carol Bove works primarily in sculpture; her work reflects on the afterimages of ‘60s and '70s culture as it continues to inform the present. Dan Colen assays a phantasmatic landscape of urban desuetude and glamour through works in various mediums. Gardar Eide Einarsson's work skirts a fine line between low-down misery culture and refined theoretical lucubration. Hanna Liden's photographic and projection works explore the intersection between sublime, art-historically informed imagery and contemporary youth culture and iconography. Nate Lowman's paintings and sculptures proffer redigested and subtly skewed reflections on contemporary celebrity/disaster culture.
Adam McEwen explores the divagations of Conceptual-art practice with regard to contemporary and historical phenomena. Josh Smith endeavors to continue the tradition of painterly abstraction in the face of its ostensible foreclosure or endgame.
Dash Snow photographs and collages are at once documentary and poetic with respect to modern madness. Agathe Snow's sculptures, installations, and performances are disturbingly replete excavations of the image-repertoire of "downtown." Banks Violette's sculptures play fast-and-loose with the conventions of minimalist and postminimalist art, all the while suggesting access to the turbid unconscious of the present day. Aaron Young performance-based works explore
ideas of violence, luxury, and masculinity.
David Rimanelli