White Room: Michele Abeles / Margaret Lee Darren Bader

White Columns is pleased to present a project organized by Margaret Lee.

These potatoes look real but they are not real. They have appeared twice before in two separate installations, though never as autonomous objects. They have been paired in the past with a cake sculpture and other cast vegetables. The potatoes, in this installation, exist with and within the works of Michele Abeles and Darren Bader.

Somewhere in between collaboration and curation, Margaret Lee uses her potatoes to intermediate between the works themselves and the other two participating artists. Neither artist was asked to follow any guidelines or rules in their approach to the project (except that they incorporate the potatoes into their own work) and all the resulting works have singular authorship. In working with Lee, Abeles uses a pile of potatoes as a prop in a new ongoing series of human-cum-still life photographs. In another image, she crudely uses the digital gesture of “cut and paste” by taking a photograph of the pile of potatoes and pasting it onto one of her pre-existing still life images (which is also present in the exhibition). Bader, inserts a glass onto a shelf lined with potatoes and also buries an iPod in a large pile of potatoes, which connects to two large speakers, nestled into an armchair, as Alicia Keys’ “No One” plays on random repeat, yes – “no one, no one, no one”.

Margaret Lee (BA Barnard College, 2001), live and works in New York. Recent projects include: ‘Betteraves Club’ (with Emily Sundblad), Performa 09, New York; and ‘Today and Everyday’, X Initiative, New York. (Both 2009.)

Michele Abeles (MFA Yale, 2007) lives and works in New York. Recent exhibitions include: ‘A Song For Those In Search Of What Came’, Bellweather, New York; and ‘The Newest New York’, Prague Biennale, Rague, Czech Republic. (Both 2009.)

Darren Bader (BFA NYU, 2000) lives and works in New York. Recent solo exhibitions include: T&Sn’Kreps, New York (2009); Gallery Sora, Tokyo, Japan (2008); and Rivington Arms, New York (2007 and 2004.)