June 21 – September 28, 2012 Monday – Friday, 7am – 7pm

One New York Plaza (Water St. between Whitehall & Broad Sts.) Concourse

Tales transforms the windows of the One New York Plaza Art Space into a giant architectural storybook with the work of four New York-based artists, Amy Kao, Colin O’Con, Butcher Walsh, and Charmaine Wheatley, who stretch beyond their primary mediums to create narrative works in vinyl. Lyrical imagery, line, color, and motion combine to create worlds filled with delight and mystery. Viewers are simultaneously invited to momentarily escape and to reflect on their own stories.


Curated by Tom Kotik.

Curator’s Statement:
Tales: the Narrative Image.
Stories can be told in many ways. Whether conveyed by print, voice or picture, story telling is a universal human activity found in all cultures around the globe. Tales, an exhibition for the concourse level at One New York Plaza, centers on narrative images created by four artists based in New York. Charmaine Wheatley, using small-scale drawings with text keenly observed and quickly sketched on the fly, builds an intimate diary of her everyday encounters. Amy Kao’s imagery draws on forms from our urban landscape, such as billboards and rooftops, creating lyrical portraits of the world we inhabit. Colin O’Con allows us to enter landscapes pregnant with metaphor through his combination of fantastical colors and expansive scenery. Butcher Walsh uses still photography much the same way the cinematographer uses motion to shape a narrative, by altering his subjects relation to the viewer as the action unfolds in front of us.

Tales will transform the Art Space at One New York Plaza into a giant architectural storybook of sorts. The thousands of commuters that pass through the concourse each week will be able to leave their own personal stories for a moment and enter worlds filled with delight, mystery and maybe even tragedy. The beauty (and necessity) of story telling is that it reveals how our personal narratives relate to the world at large, and affirms the notion that we are all connected in vital ways.


Amy Kao
24 hours, 1,440 Minutes and 86,400 Seconds
Amy Kao makes densely elaborate works that depict landscapes of hybrid motifs. She has exhibited widely at public venues, including the Brooklyn Museum, MoMA PS1, Busan Biennale in Korea and the New York Public Library. Kao is a recipient of fellowships at Yaddo, MacDowell Colony, Art Omi and the Lower East Side Printshop.

Artist Statement:
Drawing on ready-made iconography from our urban landscape, my work creates a metaphorical “second skin” to the surfaces of the cityscape. It employs ubiquitous subjects from our evolving and rapidly building surroundings, such as billboard structures, ladders, piping infrastructures, billowing clouds and smoke rising from rooftops and silhouettes of trees and birds. Together, these often overlooked but profoundly quotidian motifs render an unconscious view of the city in motion. They are further interleaved with symbols of systems and infrastructures that represent the city in abstract, such as architectural and urban planning patterns. The hybridity of imageries in distorted scales captures a glimpse of our daily lives and a moment of our wandering thoughts as inhabitants in the cityscape.


Butcher Walsh
Biophilia
Butcher Walsh, born in Ohio in 1971, is an artist whose photography aims to explore the human compulsion of narrative creation. His work as a photographer and cinematographer has shown at festivals, museums, and cinematheques such as Rotterdam International, New York Underground, Edinburgh International, Museo Reina Sofia in Madrid, and the Harvard Film Archive. His most recent collaboration in film, Sunday School with Franz Hinkelammert, will be screened at dOCUMENTA (13) in June.


Colin O’Con
Untitled
Colin O’Con is an artist from Natchitoches, LA, living and working in Brooklyn, NY. He has a B.F.A. in Painting from University of North Texas and a M.F.A. from Hunter College. His work has been included in exhibitions at Rawson Gallery (Brooklyn), Boston Center for the Arts, Five Myles Gallery (Brooklyn), Artspace (San Antonio), and CSAW (Houston). He makes paintings, installations, sculptures, and music.


Charmaine Wheatley
For My Mother
Canadian born, New York based performance artist Charmaine Wheatley has art in international museum and library collections including the Museum of Modern Art, NYC. After receiving numerous awards and doing several artist-in-residencies, most recently at The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston, MA., she’ll be living between Brooklyn and Newfoundland, Canada to complete her largest book and performance work.

Original artwork medium: Watercolour, ink, gouache on paper
Original artwork size: 5-1/4” x 4-1/2”
Creating this artwork was made possible by The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston, MA.