White Columns is pleased to present I AM SHEE, a solo exhibition by the artist and musician Amy Sheffer (b. 1945, Great Neck, NY.) The exhibition has been organized in collaboration with RVNG Intl., the eclectic and consistently innovative New York-based music institution. A visual artist, composer and musician, Sheffer resides in Great Neck, Long Island, where she continues to make vivid, quasi-surrealist paintings inflected with a distinct lyricism. In her multilayered compositions, Sheffer combines dreamlike motifs teeming with scenes of wild and domestic animals, bodily forms and the artist herself, all suffused with the sense of a dense, ecstatic psychological realm that threatens to spill over into the world of the mundane. Sheffer’s visual artwork has primarily been shown in the context of musical happenings and performances. Her exhibition at White Columns is the artist’s first solo show in New York.

Born in Great Neck, Long Island, Sheffer trained as a visual artist throughout her childhood and teenage years. An itinerant college education in the arts led her through Cornell, Cooper Union and finally NYU; though her degree was in arts education, it was at the latter two institutions where she began to embrace abstraction within her own practice after a longstanding preference for representation. 

Around this time, Sheffer began LSD therapy under the supervision of Dr. Mortimer Hartman, the psychiatrist best known for administering over 100 acid trips to Cary Grant (which the actor later credited with “saving his life.”) In the wake of this therapeutic experience, Sheffer’s painting took a turn towards the phantasmagoric as she began to experience visions, which she subsequently painted. Sheffer’s paintings share with her music a quality of improvisation or responsiveness. While she was drawn to music as much due to an intellectual interest as for its social capacity, her paintings are dialectal in the extent to which they seem almost to respond to themselves. Sheffer herself sees this as intrinsic to their quality of becoming, as she feels that her paintings can begin to take on their own beings, “wanting” things— or indeed rejecting the things that she wants out of them. 

Throughout the 1980s, Sheffer released a series of three albums — Sanctuary Mine (1980), Where’s Your Home? (1985) and We’um (1987) — working and performing with a rotating cast of collaborators including Marzette Watts, Curtis Fields, Patty Waters, William Parker, Billy Bang, Perry Robinson, and many others. All three records were initially self-released by Sheffer under the moniker “I Am Shee Records.” As a phrase, “I Am Shee” functions as a sort of mnemonic for Sheffer’s larger project: a proclamation of selfhood that is simultaneously coupled, as is often the case with Sheffer, with a slight distortion that troubles the boundaries of that self.

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White Columns is pleased to present Films for Friends, the first New York exhibition by Theo Baransky (b. 2003, Ithaca, NY). Baransky is currently affiliated with Studio Route 29, a Frenchtown, NJ-based progressive arts studio centering the creative practices and perspectives of people with intellectual and developmental disabilities.

For Theo Baransky, the experience of a movie might begin with a VHS tape from the dollar store that drifts into a corner or gathers dust on a shelf before it finally finds its way into the player, and might extend for years afterwards, as the afterimages of a particular film worm their way into the psyche. This process is shaped as much by a movie’s material form as by its content. In a recent interview with Mouse Magazine, Baransky described the budget distribution outlet Sterling Entertainment:

“If you’ve owned VHS or DVD in your life, have you ever bought some of those VHSs or DVDs that are, like, not bootleg, but really bad quality? These often come from dollar stores. I first found Sterling on a DVD of Misty of Chincoteague from 1961, which was once a Fox movie, released in theaters in ’61. The film fell into the public domain and Sterling re-released it. Sterling was also called United American Video. They founded Sterling in 1992 when they bought a company called VidAmerica. And by this point UAV had moved from Charlotte, North Carolina to Fort Mill, South Carolina. So they were basically based in the South. And I can actually do a Southern accent. Amidst the public domain DVD crash in 2006, Sterling closed its doors.”

This is a characteristic Baransky summation of the lifespan of a film, tracing all of its perambulations before arriving on our screens— in fact, how it might have once appeared on other screens, fallen out of circulation and reemerged in a different form. Baransky makes paintings that are “about” movies, but what they mainly depict are the logos, signs and symbols that appear before a movie begins. That he sources many of his images from the VHS tapes that he collects is indicative of a particular inflection point in the span of our ever-broadening access to movies. More accessible than when movies could be seen only in theaters, but less so than the streaming services that were to come, VHS tapes are also much more explicitly objects, and as such they bear vestiges of the routes through which they were produced and disseminated. This once made them something to be sought out, bought, collected, traded, cherished. Baransky’s paintings restore them to this cherished status. In doing so, he manages to evoke both the swirl of sentiment rustled up as we wait for the action to start and to condense the systems through which the story has travelled to arrive before us, the viewers. That journey, Baransky’s work argues, is more than ancillary: it affects and indeed alters the content and meaning of the film itself.

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For further information about these exhibitions contact: violet@whitecolumns.org

Gallery hours: Tuesday – Saturday, 11am to 6pm.

White Columns
91 Horatio Street
New York, NY 10014
Tuesday–Saturday, 11 AM–6 PM
info@whitecolumns.org
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