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12

Carina Brandes
Blow Up

at 47 Wooster St.

03 March - 03 April 2016
opening reception: 03 March, 6-8pm

Team (gallery, inc.) is pleased to announce a solo show by German photographer Carina Brandes. Entitled Blow Up, the exhibition will run from 03 March to 03 April 2016. Team (gallery, inc.) is located at 47 Wooster Street, between Grand and Broome, on the ground floor. Concurrently, our 83 Grand Street space will house a one-person exhibition by Ross Knight.
Carina Brandes' black and white photographs, which depict hypnogogic scenes of play, are the shadowy phantoms of their referent reality. Without the use of explicitly fantastical elements, she conceives and realizes a self-contained, subjective world; the camera serves the artist as a tool for invention and projection, rather than objective documentation. These images isolate ephemeral moments from insoluble, Delphic rituals: nude women (most often the artist herself) perform choreographed actions in otherwise unoccupied nature. The medium of the still image, and these pictures' arcane but legible contents, engenders an unsettlingly incomplete narrativity: the artist invites an inherently futile hermeneutic investigation, articulating a question but permanently delaying its answer. By presenting an enigma without a solution, she places the viewer in the uneasy binary position of narrator and audience.

The photos draw attention to their own artifice, shirking the conception of representational photography as a mimetic medium. Brandes gives significant weight to her photos' physicality, their object-status - meticulously hand-producing her images, choosing specific and unusual frames, and tightly regulating their presentation. Her delicate treatment of black and white reduces photography to its constituent elements of light, shadow and contrast, foregrounding its mechanical contrivance, contending that photography, like language, is a flawed semantic medium characterized by the impassable chasm between the signified and its signifier.
Brandes is present twofold in her photos, both as subject and artist, watcher and watched. Neither position is prioritized; on the contrary, each exists as the refracted shadow of the other, each crucial to its reflection's formation. The works controvert the notion of the self as a distinct entity, instead positing the individual as a swirling set of associations, an ephemeral conglomeration of ever-changing images and mutating perceptions. The motifs of masking, shrouding, mimicking and repetition appear throughout the oeuvre: in one image, a figure wears a crude ghost costume, and stands alongside a supine dog wearing the same. In another photo, she appears in tandem with an only barely distinguishable second figure, also in the nude, and of the same approximate age and build, standing behind her, positioned identically, a corporeal shadow.

While the photographs are defined in part by their obscurity, they are nonetheless symbolically legible, their imagery often resonating with Classical mythology. A photo of a woman carrying a huge, mysterious orb recalls both Atlas and Sisyphus; several others variously depict nude female forms on a beach, bleak recapitulations of the birth of Venus. The evocation of ancient narratives is never direct, and thus ambiguously intentional, casting the viewer as an active participant in her unique visual storytelling. They are pure mise-en-scène,signification without narration, complete in their impenetrable isolation as still images.

Brandes has been the subject of monographic exhibitions both in the United States and Europe. This is her second solo show with Team.

The gallery is open from Wednesday through Saturday, 10am to 6pm, and Sunday, 12pm to 6pm. For further information and/or images, please call 212 279 9219.

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Ross Knight
Human Stuff

at 83 Grand St.

03 March - 03 April 2016
opening reception: 03 March, 6-8pm

Team (gallery, inc.) is pleased to announce a solo show by New York-based sculptor Ross Knight. Entitled Human Stuff, the exhibition will run from 03 March to 03 April 2016. Team (gallery, inc.) is located at 83 Grand Street, between Greene and Wooster, on the ground floor. Concurrently, our 47 Wooster Street space will house a one-person exhibition by Carina Brandes.

For this exhibition, Ross Knight presents a brand new show of sculpture, including intimately scaled works displayed individually, as well as larger floor pieces. The artworks evoke both the human body and man-made mechanical objects, exploring the frictional territory between the animal and the artificial. Through their unusual and specific composition and discernably calculated design, many of the pieces deceptively evoke functionality, suggesting a use-value that quickly dissipates upon closer consideration. Others absurdly appropriate the structure of jewelry displays, slyly isolating taken-for-granted modes of presentation, as well as drawing attention to the body of work's own peculiar delicacy, appreciable in spite of the evidently industrial nature of its constituent materials.

While Knight's past exhibitions have been characterized by a certain degree of bluntly ostentatious visual dynamism - containing luminous neon shades and monumentally scaled works - these pieces are decidedly more restrained, both in scale and color. His palette is confined to pale pinks and neutrals - the pigments of the body, of flesh and bone - and few exceed a square foot in size. While less visually flamboyant, Knight's subtle penchant for bawdy innuendo remains, as does his imaginative sense of form and material. In shedding those Pop-inspired elements of his aesthetic, he imbues the work with an ironic impression of refinement and preciousness.

The sculptures in this exhibition are comprised of raw, industrial materials - chrome steel, polyethylene, platinum silicone rubber, urethane, plaster gauze - as well as more recognizable found commercial objects - a knee brace, a pull chain, suction cups, underarm deodorant. The potential to "misuse" material is a central tenant of Knight's practice; there is a meticulous, near-scientific sense of exploration to the work. The works' titles - Bead Chain (skin replacement) Stand, or (6Lb) Fat/Mallet Replica - reflect the investigative nature of the artist's process, legible as methodologies - the ingredients to an experiment for his mysterious sculptural hypotheses.

The work finds formal precedent in the human body as well the recent history of sculpture, while unconditionally avoiding mimetic or formal mimicry. With Minimalism, they share a fetishistic enthusiasm for surface, but opt for more alien material and non-geometric forms. Owing to the likes of Richard Serra, Eva Hesse and Robert Morris a concern with gravity, mass and volume, the sculptures gracefully confound assumptions about the ways in which objects can occupy space. Knight's practice is likewise informed by the progenerative nature of all acts of making, the connection between the reproductive drive and artistic production - a notion explicated via his visual allusions to the bodily and, specifically, the sexual.

Knight is based in New York and has exhibited his work in the U.S. and abroad, at venues including: MoMA P.S.1, Long Island City, NY; Sculpture Center, Long Island City, NY; Socrates Sculpture Park, Queens, NY; Tucson Museum of Contemporary Art, Tucson, AZ; and The Wanås Foundation, Sweden.

The gallery is open Tuesday through Saturday, 10am to 6pm, and Sunday, 12pm to 6pm. For further information and/or images, please call 212 279 9219.