The exhibition features new conceptually-based works that examine aspects of the natural environment in relation to the element of time. The second in a two-part series, it follows our last show, Land/Sky, which brought together artworks and ephemera by six artists associated with Land Art, Fluxus, and other avant-garde movements of the 1960s and 1970s. In both shows, the contemplation of nature and culture is presented in a wide range of mediums by artists of diverse backgrounds.

 

Land/Sky: Temporal Concepts includes a new painting by Dean Byington, a large-scale video projection by IC-98 (Visa Suonpää and Patrik Söderlund), the artistic partnership that represented Finland in the 2015 Venice Biennale, and new photographs by Laurel Nakadate.

 

We are extremely pleased to present the New York premiere of IC-98’s black and white animated film Abendland (Hours, Years, Aeons) (2015), first presented in Venice and most recently screened in the New Frontier section of the Sundance Film Festival. Seen projected onto a 10 x 10 foot free-standing wall designed to “float” within the darkened gallery space, the viewer experiences the slow mutations and metamorphoses of an exquisitely drawn gnarled, ancient tree. The film envisions a distant future devoid of human life, depicting, according to the artists, “a twisted ecosystem centered around an overgrown fruit tree [that] undergoes parasitic and geological transformations as hours, years, and aeons pass.”

 

Imagined history is also present in the works of Dean Byington who, since the late 1990s, has made highly process-driven works that combine appropriated and invented images in the style of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century prints and illustrations. His painting, Saturn 2 (2015), on view in the exhibition, uses dense, detailed imagery, articulated in black, white, and gray, to envision a vast, anachronistic urban landscape shaped by urgent global issues such as climate change and cultural difference. In the center of the painting, three “billboards” depicting portions of Frederic Edwin Church’s monumental Romantic landscape painting El Rio de Luz (The River of Light) (1877), appear on a stage-like platform constructed of jet-engine parts, set within a tortured landscape.

 

The exhibition will also include the newest images in Laurel Nakadate’s ongoing photographic series, Star Portraits and Relations, the subject of her recent one person show at the Des Moines Art Center and the accompanying publication, Laurel Nakadate: Strangers and Relations. For Star Portraits, which she began in the summer of 2011, Nakadate arranged to meet strangers at night in remote locations under vast starry skies in the American Southwest. Nakadate and her subjects see each other for the first time as she records the instant of their encounters, using simple techniques including long exposures, available starlight, moonlight, and a single handheld flashlight. The present and past intersect in Relations, the series that Nakadate began the following year. Through the DNA testing website 23andMe and other online resources, she identified strangers with whom she shares common ancestors, inviting these distant relatives – women, men, and children of widely varying racial, religious, and socioeconomic backgrounds – to meet her at night, in landscapes near their homes. The resulting images, spotlit within dreamlike settings, comprise a complex family album, a portrait of America in the dark. Nakadate sees “these strangers, who are also relatives, as little glimmers of the ancestors who connected us hundreds of years ago.”

 

Dean Byington (b. 1958, Santa Monica, California) lives and works in Oakland, California. He has exhibited at galleries and museums throughout the United States, most recently in solo exhibitions last year at the American University Museum at the Katzen Arts Center in Washington, DC and at Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects. Works by the artist are in the collections of such major institutions as the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Indianapolis Museum of Art, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and others.

 

Visa Suonpää (b. 1968, Tampere, Finland) and Patrik Söderlund (b. 1974, Turku, Finland) formed their artistic partnership IC-98 (formerly Iconoclast) in 1998. Their projects often take the form of installations or publications, combining research, texts, drawing, and animation. Their work is currently on view in solo exhibitions at the Helsinki Art Museum and at Dundee Contemporary Arts in Scotland (through February 14, 2016). Forthcoming solo shows will take place at the Roda Sten Konsthall in Gothenburg, Sweden (February 6 through March 4, 2016) and at the Pori Art Museum, Pori, Finland (2017). Works by IC-98 are in the collections of major institutions including, among others, Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki, and the Helsinki Art Museum.

 

Laurel Nakadate (b. 1975, Austin, Texas) has participated in solo and group exhibitions at museums and galleries worldwide including a critically acclaimed ten-year survey Laurel Nakadate: Only the Lonely at MoMA PS 1 in 2011. Her works are in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Cincinnati Art Museum, the Des Moines Art Center, the Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw, and other distinguished institutions. The artist has also received widespread acclaim for two feature-length films, Stay the Same Never Change, which premiered at the 2009 Sundance Festival, and The Wolf Knife (2010), which was nominated for Gotham and Independent Spirit Awards.

 

Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects is located on the sixth floor of 535 West 22nd Street, between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues. Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 10:00 am to 6:00 pm.