Looking Back: The White Columns Annual, selected by Clarissa Dalrymple.
November 16–December 21, 2007
Untitled
Everything All at Once
Rising Down
Two Grey Squares
Press Release
‘Looking Back’ is the second installment of the White Columns Annual. The exhibition is now an annual fixture on White Columns’ calendar. Each year an individual (e.g. an artist, a curator, a writer, etc.) will be invited to make an exhibition at White Columns based on their personal experience of looking at art in New York in the previous year. For the second ‘Annual’ exhibition White Columns has invited the New York-based curator Clarissa Dalrymple to select the artists and works.
In a very straightforward sense the annual exhibition hopes to reveal something of the complexities involved in trying to negotiate – and engage with – New York’s constantly evolving art landscape. The format of the exhibition inevitably encourages highly subjective and deeply personal responses to the realities of viewing art in New York. The ‘Annual’ exhibition series hopes to illuminate aspects of the specific, yet highly idiosyncratic routes – geographical, intellectual, social, etc. – individuals follow in an increasingly expansive and fragmented cultural milieu.
Through the re-contextualization of artworks encountered in other circumstances and contexts, the exhibition hopes to establish – albeit temporarily – a new ‘narrative’, a conversation, of sorts, amongst artists and artworks, that seeks to illuminate and/or explore certain underlying tendencies, conditions, or connections that perhaps might otherwise have remained elusive or obscured. In re-thinking the (fairly) recent past the exhibition hopes to provoke something akin to a sense of deja-vu, establishing a scenario that is at once both reflective and optimistic (forward thinking.)
There are no restrictions as to what type of work can be included. ‘Looking Back’ seeks to eliminate any categorical or hierarchical distinctions we might place upon artworks (e.g. based upon the circumstances in which they were originally seen, or the seniority of an individual artist, etc.) The only stipulation is that the curator encountered works by each of the selected artists in New York in the previous twelve months. These works might have been originally seen in exhibitions at musems, galleries, not-for-profit spaces, during visits to artists’ studios, or in private collections, etc.
About the selector:
Clarissa Dalrymple is a New York-based curator. Renowned for her pioneering support of many artists – including Matthew Barney, Damien Hirst, Sarah Lucas, Neo Rauch, and Nate Lowman, amongst others – Dalrymple co-ran New York’s Cable Gallery between 1982 and 1988 with Nicole Klagsbrun, where they staged early shows by Ashley Bickerton, Collier Schorr, Christopher Wool, and Haim Steinbach, amongst many others. More recently she has organized projects for the Marc Selwyn gallery in Los Angeles, and for Nicole Klagsbrun’s own gallery in New York. The subject of a recent profile in the New York Times by Linda Yablonsky, Dalrymple is currently a consultant to the Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York, where she has recently introduced the work of Jay Heikes and Adam Helms (both of whom are included in ‘Looking Back’.)
Untitled
Everything All at Once
Rising Down
Two Grey Squares
