Old Dogs, New Tricks
April 24 - May 30, 2009
installation images selected works thumbnails
Press Release
Old Dogs, New Tricks presents recent works signaling new directions by three veteran New York City-based artists, R.M. Fischer, Hermine Ford and John Newman. Deploying the art of unexpected juxtaposition in a changing line-up of materials, processes, and sources, all three artists create surprising new forms through additive construction procedures. These new works turn on its head the popular misconception that innovation and deviation from rules or forms is limited to youthful preoccupation.
These amalgamations of the heteroclite--these deviations from common forms--obtain three-dimensional expression in John Newman's hard and in R.M. Fischer's otherwise soft sculpture and two dimensions in Hermine Ford's small, meticulously patterned paintings.
This is the first exhibition of R.M.Fischer's new soft sculptures, fashioned from hand-sewn forms of printed vinyl and upholstery fabric then filled polyester fiber conjure up an eccentric mix on non-western tribal art and low-brow popular culture.
Hermine Ford's oil on linen paintings collect and re-figure shards of diverse historical reference, including architectural pattern and tile design. By adding fragments of fragments of fragments to the artist's multiplying archeology of forms, Ford's new combinations conjure up a new found alphabet of lost dreams.
John Newman also draws on a jarring diversity of considered and crafted components found and fabricated--bronze, wicker, stone, paper, glass--and surprising combinations of materials and forms, adding up to unforeseen sequences marking the infinitude of difference.