OVER BEFORE IT STARTED
GRAYSON REVOIR, KON TRUBKOVICH, DANIEL TURNER
JUNE 24, 7–9 PM


"Over Before It Started" is the first show at West Street Gallery, a project space curated by Alex Gartenfeld and Matt Moravec in the former’s new apartment. We have invited Grayson Revoir, Kon Trubkovich, and Daniel Turner to present works that deal with the initiation demanded by space. The works by each artist respond to the responsibilities of site-responsiveness in the context of a newly inhabited domestic space.

Daniel Turner worked as a guard at the New Museum, where he was prohibited from leaning against the wall. It was his first experience of the impact of his repeated physical contact on a surface—and its prohibition. Turner’s site-specific, untitled wall drawings involve seamlessly repeated, bodily gestures involve the manual pressing of material to create a cloud of ambiguously indexical marks. The effects are painterly, both wearing down and adding to the plaster ground of the architecture. The drawings record, even celebrate, duration while suspending it in an abstract, universal time.

Using varied strategies of inscription and vandalism, and conceptualizing his timed labor as a prolonged sequence of destructions, Grayson Revoir designs and fabricates structures in the mode of furniture. He then exposes the sculpture to water and wear, and uses metal hardware to simultaneously puncture, decorate, and add heft, finally rendering it useless. Pushing the idiom of seasonal or decorative furniture into a domestic context; oversized and at once warped, worn, and bejeweled, Untitled (2010–), is both the anthropomorphic form and its seat. Revoir treats manual labor as a type of play, treated through the trappings and various metaphors of recreation and its continuous deliquescence.

With this series of four charcoal drawings, Kon Trubkovich focuses his interest in the experience of sealed spaces, ranging from the prison to the artist’s studio. In the past, the artist has commissioned actors to populate his architectural records; here, he visited an abandoned prison whose surveillance methods preceded closed-circuit cameras. The artist videotapes this (invisible to the public) loop of opticality, and renders it eerily obsolescent. The drawings are scattered about the gallery space, reproducing the effect of perambulating a cell. Fixed as stills but diverging expressionistically from Trubkovich’s source-videos, the drawings are windows of barely fixed rendering.