It’s About Time

Showing: February 6 - April 1st

          “Time is the longest distance between two places,”

•   Tennessee Williams. 

511 Gallery is pleased to present It’s About Time, a group exhibition that brings together 17 artworks from the gallery’s permanent collection plus selected pieces from past shows.  Featuring the work of 13 artists, including Nina Katchadourian, Gregory Crewdson, Lee Bontecou, Mark Mennin, David Hockney, and Jennifer Odem, among others, the exhibition spans multiple genres (portraits, landscapes, geometric abstraction) and media (painting, sculpture, photographs and prints) drawn from 511’s archive.

It's About Time explores how time and space intersects and interacts in art.  These artists approach the subject of time through the intellectual and emotional processes of memory, anticipation, and duration and often with humor and irony

British artist Lucy Levene’s Mark Naftalin, from the series, Marrying In (Please God By You) (2003), is a large, double self-portrait.  Levene is shown standing beside an empty chair, perhaps reserved and waiting for her, while a young man is seated next to it, cross-legged, his eyes focused on the artist’s feet, which are turned outwards, as if in stationary boredom as time passes by silently.

Born and raised in a Jewish family, in London, but at the time attending college in Edinburgh, where there were few young Jewish men available to date, Levene’s Marrying In series confronts a view held by the parents of many ethnic backgrounds that by a certain age it is “about time” that their daughters or sons find someone of their own cultures to marry.  In this double portrait of Mark Naftalin -- one of eight in the series in which Levene photographed herself with ten eligible young Jewish men in their homes, spaces in which she is a stranger – the artist stands in a somewhat defiant manner, her arms folded protectively across her body and a wary expression on her face.  Her camera’s shutter release cord emanating from under her running shoes. 

Montreal painter and printmaker, Alain Bonder, by contrast, uses memory and pictorial space in the actual composition of his print, Carpal Tunnel Syndrome (2011) so as to create an intriguing, somewhat frightening but quietly so, drama.  Bonder’s composition is a head-and - shoulders portrait, in which the face of a woman, dressed in vivid yellow, perhaps a character in a horror film, has a mouth wide open in screams as strokes of black charcoal move across her hair, eyes, and mouth and faint drips of black fall from her shoulders onto the white negative space of the print paper.  Apart from the woman and the ink marks, the only other object in the pictorial space is an intricate black  doily, large and out of scale with the female figure, floating in the white space directly over her.  Bonder isolates his characters in space, with only a single object hovering over them, as if in a silent film frame from the 1920’s or 1930’s, and reflecting on his process and methods has said, “Each piece speaks to my frequent themes of time, place, and memory.”

Hung salon-style, About Time encourages viewers to move slowly and look closely.  Works are placed at an intimate height, inviting shifts between differing experiences of time and space.  Collectively, the exhibition posits time as something with multiple meanings, rather than simply precisely measured duration – an accumulation of moments, constructions, and even delays that resist neat resolution.

For further information, please contact 511 Gallery at 212-255-2885 or via email at 511gallery@gmail.com