Book: painting: poem: drawing: poster: book: sculpture: painting: book: drawing: poster: painting: drawing: drawing: drawing: poem: drawing: poster: painting: drawing: book: sculpture: painting: painting: poster: drawing: poem: painting. For Nikholis Planck, any work evacuates into another. It is difficult to keep up with his frenetic hand.
Let this press release serve as the initial proposition of Nikholis Planck @ Simone Subal. Tonight, April 19th, there is an exhibition of Planck’s paintings, sculptures, photographs, and posters, though these works are embedded with information (times, dates, abbreviations of names, scribbles, detritus, etc.) from other paintings, drawings, sculptures, performances, and exhibitions. Throughout his work, Planck riffs on convention to deliver a joke from the shared misery of life’s long, continual, and undifferentiated looking. Making fun that renders hierarchies moot between media; a temptation to interpretation to deliver a punch-line in its descriptive rhetoric. This melodrama is but one part of it; there is also the boredom, uncertainty, and nearly obsessive anxiety that is attached to such fluidity of time and information. It frames all the works as a continual live event and suggests that meaning is a never-ending viewing party.
For these reasons, Planck has been invited to employ the gallery as an atelier for the exhibition’s two-week duration. Other works will be constructed, performances choreographed and rehearsed, large scale works made possible, and collaboration on Planck’s upcoming exhibition at Violet’s Cafe facilitated. It is not a performance of labor – these things will take place privately outside of viewing hours, except for the public performance that will likely close the show on May 3rd. Nonetheless, the exhibition will be re-interpreted by multiple people and works throughout its course – it’s two weeks are only a loose register of the other temporalities, past, present, and future, that Planck’s practice will inhabit. Humor steps through convention; for a moment, the imagination is more intimate and comfortable within the anarchic darkness of uncertainty. Nikholis Planck @ Simone Subal proposes to bypass looking through Planck’s ethics of experience.
– Sam Korman, 2015
Planck was born in 1987 in Arlington, VA. He lives and works in New York. Planck has held solo and two-person exhibitions with KARMA, New York; sohpiajacob, Baltimore; and the Contemporary Museum, Baltimore. His work was recently included in The Painter of Modern Life, organized by Bob Nickas, Anton Kern Gallery, New York; 24/7, organized by Alex Bacon, Monte Carlo, Miami; and Grand Prix, organized by Gresham’s Ghost, New York/Baltimore. Planck has held performances with Signal Gallery, Brooklyn; Rachel Uffner, New York; and the Floristree, Baltimore; and his books and publications include An Active Line, The Wonderful & Frightening World of the Fall (with Bob Nickas), Functions of Drawing, Weird II, Shit Karmas, and Escape Route.
