Float Like a Butterfly
Sting Like a Bee

- Muhammad Ali

Kathryn Andrews, Taft Green,
Alice Konitz, Patrick Meagher
Curated by Yunhee Min

June 18 - July 1, 2009
Opening Thursday June 18, 6-8PM

It is a beautiful phrase, boxing or not.

Butterflies when in air, move, flutter with lightest of motion. Always graceful, up, down and sideways.
le petit joie.

Bees can sting, often charging out of nowhere. And how does one know when one is stung? Because the sting stings. It pricks and sends your whole body to a point of tension. Such intensity of sensation may cause a momentary shock, making one to lose one’s composure. Followed by this event are various physiological traces - swelling, bruising and itching. For most, these temporary bodily effects mark an event, a remembrance of things past.

Kathryn Andrews is interested in problematizing our habitual ways of signification and reception in cultural meaning production. She broadens such modes by soliciting exteriority through social relations, participation, as well as performative gestures to propose formation of authorship as provisional and contingent. Thus, contexts as ideas, as well as physical space are structures for Kathryn to redirect viewer’s orientations and experiences to undermine a symbolic unification of meaning.

Taft Green, like Lyotard trusts the mute intelligence in the matter itself. Interested in spatio-temporal dynamics with which we experience the present - always made up of multiple past(s) - matter, as form and structure is central to his proposition of making sense. Often amalgamating multiple systems of information and relations, both abstract and empirical, generating opportunities for expression and feedback, Taft arrives at forms spatialized in complex faceted ways that unfold with the experience of physical movement of the viewer.

Alice Konitz’s forms often remind as of modernist idioms of distilled geometry and ideas of modularity. Alice’s materials and craft are, however, both light and immediate in their material hierarchy and production value. Such economy circumvents modernism as a universal social project and gives attention to its vernacular proliferation. Moreover, the work resonates casual familiarity revealing seams of material reality absent of reductive irony.

Patrick Meagher’s work revolves around references to global architecture, economics and digital technology around the turn of the millennium as effected by the Internet boom and the new economy in America. Constantly zooming in and out to reflect and participate in contemporary cultural and economic value systems, Patrick is interested in the discussion of future as a new era of consciousness. His materials range from Styrofoam packaging as emblematic memory and traces of modernism, web iconography reflecting globalism to steel and plastic forms of invented personal symbols of emotions.