Raffi Kalenderian: Green River
Shinique Smith: Black Swan
November 23, 2016–January 14, 2017
Opening: November 23, 7–9pm
Brand New Gallery
via Carlo Farini 32
20159 Milan
Italy
Hours: Tuesday–Saturday 11am–1pm,
and 2:30–7pm
T +39 02 89 05 30 83
press [at] brandnew-gallery.com
Raffi Kalenderian: Green River
For his second solo exhibit Green River at Brand New Gallery, Raffi Kalenderian draws on an array of techniques that illuminate his process and expand on his Californian vision.
His attentiveness to image-making draws on qualities of both darkness and the vibrancy of flash photography. He once again portrays a milieu of Los Angeles creatives—fellow painters, poets, actors, artists—emerging from a hypnotic blackness, imbued with an awkward dignity. Even when he departs from portraiture it remains an anchor that grounds his corpus, as does his process, in the psychological. The subjects seem to be waiting for someone or something, with their gazes often lost in the void, absorbed in a narrative that seems to have no limits in either space or time.
In this body of work, space bends, brush marks dissolve images, and darkness is built-up in layers, creating moments where paintings mechanisms are the real subject. Kalenderian’s approach to landscape is activated by an abstraction and freedom that set them apart from the pastoral, existing instead as a reckoning with an environment impacted by crisis.
The show’s title is borrowed from a song by seminal Californian rock band Creedence Clearwater Revival:
“You’re gonna find the world is smouldrin’. And if you get lost come on home to Green River.”
Shinique Smith: Black Swan
Brand New Gallery presents Black Swan, Shinique Smith’s second solo exhibition at the gallery.
The show features an installation of new works exploring ideas of transformation and energy transference through painting, sculpture and mixed media installation.
In this exhibition, Smith uses her signature materials of fabric, calligraphy and collage, as well as her body as a brush to create a new site-specific wall painting of frenetic script and gestural body prints, which will be in conversation with paintings and hanging sculptures.
Black Swan is a metaphor for a rare event, like the sighting of a previously unknown, once assumed, mythical bird that when seen changes preconceived notions built on the belief of its non-existence.
Through this collection of works Smith continues her “quest for wonder, beauty and the expression of unseen forces” that may lie within the preconceived notions of everyday objects.
Shinique Smith’s work is inspired by the vast nature of “things” that we consume and discard, which resonate on a personal and social scale. The graffiti of her youth, Japanese calligraphy, and abstraction are influences from which she extracts “the graceful and spiritual qualities in written word and the everyday.”
