JAMES COHAN - William Monk, Heather Rowe, Richard T Walker

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• published: 29 Mar 2014
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William Monk, Heather Rowe, Richard T. Walker Rowe, Monk, & Walker James Cohan Gallery 533 West 26th St New York, NY 10001 March 27th - April 25th, 2014 Opening: March 27th 6:00 PM - 8:00 PM James Cohan Gallery is pleased to present solo exhibitions by Heather Rowe, William Monk and Richard T. Walker, on view March 27 through April 25, 2014. Gallery 1: Heather Rowe Heather Rowe's sculptures can initially resemble architectural structures. Sharp planes activate negative and positive space, glass and mirror create disorienting effects, and screw holes, scuffs, and pencil marks leave traces of the history of construction. These built-up works emphasize interiority and exteriority, light, space and materiality to generate formal and metaphorical situations, actively involving the viewer. For this exhibition Rowe presents a new large-scale installation, the latest in a series of works that explore the multiple natures of a "screen" as it might exist within a domestic setting. Bisecting the gallery in a series of accordion-shaped screens, the work investigates how architecture can affect the body's relationship to space, frustrating viewpoints and blocking movement. Using a mix of new and found components, formal elements of the sculpture amplify a fluctuating anxiety. Unfinished plywood and fragments of textured wallpaper recall interrupted interior rooms or theater sets. Heavy glass mounted into light frames seems fragile and challenges the work's stability. The window frames suggest movement and rotation, but they are frozen. Gallery 2: William Monk William Monk is an artist with an acute interest in the way painting is experienced and, accordingly, the ways in which he as a painter can guide those experiences. Monk's paintings pulsate with ecstatically worked surfaces, an atmospheric palette, and leaps in scale between micro and macro. In each work there is a universe of information to discover. Engaged equally with image and paint, Monk's paintings remain true to both. As the artist says, "digital images are becoming the de facto way we perceive and process the world, with surface and superficial virtuosity defining momentary meaning. This creates a problem. How to ensure that painting is experienced as a very different form of engagement, and framing as more than the inferred edges of an iMac screen? Although I have taken from the digital world, it is to confront this imagery with physical, organic paintings. Both image and materiality are explored to a point where the final object becomes painting that expresses its origin as much as its conclusion." Paravent (Universum) (2014) is not so much a depiction of a forest as a painted equivalent: cropped just short of the forest floor and hung low on the wall, the painting's dense composition holds the viewer in a place between the physical and mental, primed to revel in the patterns of our inner and outer world. "Rather than have a human presence in the work in a traditional narrative sense," Monk explains, "I want the viewer to be aware of their own presence in front of the object. I feel to include the human form would act as a barrier to that." Gallery 3: Richard T. Walker Richard T. Walker records his encounters with the American landscape in video, installation, text, photography and music, raising questions about the journey toward consciousness and our relationship to the natural world. Walker's diaristic work nods naturally to 19th-Century Romanticism and the intensity of landscape conjured by Caspar David Friedrich or Frederic Church, while the American landscape's representation on film—the way that nature can become a protagonist in a narrative—is an equally strong inspiration Music by: Chill Carrier - A New Day