Registered – Elena Bajo, Margarida Correia, Gregg Evans, Claudia Weber

Curated by Ryan Evans and Amie Scally

White Columns is proud to present “Registered”, an exhibition featuring the work of four artists selected from White Columns’ online Curated Artist Registry. Accessed via our website, the Curated Artist Registry is an online navigable database of over 600 artists who are not affiliated with a New York City gallery.

Using primarily found materials, Elena Bajo creates a space of potentiality for the viewer. Referencing the idea of the blank and the erased as explored in the work of John Cage and Robert Rauschenberg, the installation on view is suspended somewhere in between photography, film, sculpture, drawing, text and painting, using White Columns’ exhibition space as both inherent framework for the work and as a medium. The artist has described her interest in “the social and political dimensions of everyday spaces, the strategies to conceptualize resistance, the poetics of ideologies, and the relationship between temporalities and subjectivities.”

Elena Bajo lives and works in New York and Berlin. She has an upcoming solo exhibition at P.S.1, and recently participated in projects at Sculpture Center, LIC (2009), ISCP, New York (2009), Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien, Berlin (2008) and was one of the founders of the temporary art space Two-Eleven, NYC (2009). In 2005, she received an MFA from Central Saint Martins School of Art in London.

Margarida Correia presents two projects from an ongoing series entitled “Things” in which she photographs the interiors of friends’ homes in Lisbon, Portugal. Considering the individual’s history through their collected family heirlooms as well as photographs of family members and childhood snapshots, Correia explores a connection between the past and present. The artist has written that she is interested in how “Inherited objects are interwoven with personal stories to develop our understandings of history…linking cultural values of successive generations.” Correia juxtaposes images from past and present to both examine the relationships between portraiture, archival photographs, and still life, and to establish a continuity of the subject’s personal history. Each photograph has a unique gesture – the archival photographs evoke the historical context, the still lifes depict the objects in their current state, and the portraits combine subject and object situated together in their present environment.

Margarida Correia lives and works in New York. She recently had solo exhibitions at Real Art Ways, Hartford, CT (2009), Gallery 111, Lisbon, Portugal (2007), A.I.R. Fellowship Gallery (2006) and has been included in group exhibitions at ABC No Rio (2009) and Bronx Museum of New York (2008). She received a MFA from the School of Visual Arts, NY.

Gregg Evans presents a selection of photographs from “The Things I Once Owned” series, a recent body of work which was prompted by the sale of his childhood home. In the artist’s former bedroom, Evans meticulously staged and photographed belongings from his childhood and adolescence. The depicted objects range from such keepsakes as a card from his grandmother, a photograph of his father, to mementos from his teen years, i.e., autographs by the band Le Tigre in a day planner, art school catalogs, a collection of pins… suggesting a personal, yet unresolved, narrative. Evans’ process is closely linked to performance and challenges the idea of the document and its relationship to sentimentality, nostalgia and permanence.

Gregg Evans lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. He was a recipient of the GEISAI MIAMI 2008 award and has an upcoming exhibition at Envoy Enterprises in New York. He has been included in group exhibitions at Envoy Enterprises and Project Basho Gallery, Philadelphia (both 2009). He received a BFA from SUNY Purchase in 2005.

Claudia Weber recontextualizes materials and forms within existing architectural spaces. The resultant reconfigurations create a slippage between the real and the model, the figurative and the abstract, producing installations where photographs merge documentation with abstraction, and sculptures dissolve into images. Weber’s interest in base metals as a valuable resource for miners, alchemists, and entrepreneurs acts as the catalyst for her installation at White Columns. The artist metaphorically assumes these three roles simultaneously, as Weber writes, “collecting raw materials, transforming them into abstract refinements, and rethinking their established position as commodities. The result is an abstracted interior, the white cube of the gallery as a ‘tabula rasa,’ where ideas gain currency through new configurations and contexts.”

Claudia Weber lives and works in New York and Berlin. Recent solo exhibitions include those at Schumacher/Trute, Berlin (2008), Offspace, Vienna, and Momenta Art, Brooklyn (2005). She is a recipient of the LMCC Workspace Residency Program (2009-2010) and participated in many group exhibitions in Berlin, Cologne, and London.