It is with great pleasure that Simone Subal Gallery announces the opening of Everything and All of That: Charles Mayton, Kathrin Sonntag, and Erika Vogt on Sunday, September 8, 2013. The show runs until October 27, 2013. Please join us for an opening reception on September 8 from 6-8pm.
Charles Mayton, Kathrin Sonntag, and Erika Vogt’s works are subtle meditations on the production, reception, and consumption of artworks, taking these distinct temporal events and folding them upon one another. Gone, for example, are clear-cut distinctions between the studio and the gallery, just as the primacy of medium becomes categorically unnecessary. As points of origins and conclusions in their art circle back upon themselves, an intellectual fluidity emerges in which time, medium, and narrative structures constellate into profound ways of picturing an ever-shifting world.
Charles Mayton’s conceptual paintings take as their starting point both the process of making and the conditions and conventions of seeing. Uncomfortable with the ease with which painting can be assimilated in the current context of contemporary art, Mayton often foregrounds the anxieties of the studio, the difficulties, for example, one faces when confronted by the blank canvas. The palpable energy of the creative act made somewhat ironic, but not cynical, by his occasional gestural brush strokes is complicated by his clever plays with image-text relations as well as almost innocuous trompe l’oeil effects that revel in the pictorial possibilities of painting.
Kathrin Sonntag works in photography, film, and installation. Her poetic pieces invoke the instability of images. She has been of late interested in problems of mirroring and doubling. This has resulted in projects in which a subtle kind of simultaneity comes forward, in which similar, almost identical, things appear at once. This temporal conflation is enhanced by her interest in the idea of the studio as well as archival research into private collections, making her work a Mobius strip of references and illusions.
The current work by Erika Vogt builds upon her inter-media projects of the past few years. She continues to explore the expanded field of video, sculpture, and drawing, and sees these mediums as sharing similar properties such that distinctions between them dissolve. Her recent videos pulsate with energy, focusing on particular objects and motifs through a recurrence of hypnotic and densely layered imagery. In continual dialog with the videos as well as the space, Vogt’s delicately monumental sculptures, constructed out of ropes, pulleys, and levers, suspend cast objects—ordinary things from the detritus of everyday life—such that they become nearly venerated. It is in the conversation between object and video that Vogt creates narratives that try to encapsulate all that make a story and everything that has been left out.
