P R E S S P L AY
Curated & produced by Willie Green
MASSEY KLEIN 124 FORSYTH STREET NY, NY 10002 MASSEYKLEIN.COM INFO@MASSEYKLEIN.COM
PRESS PLAY
Curated & produced by Willie Green Featuring works by:
Giulia Dall’Olio, Michael Holman, Stephane Joannes, Martine Johanna, Garrett Klein, Matthew Larson, Wouter Nijland, and Laura Sallade
June 21 - August 24, 2019
Massey Klein Gallery 124 Forsyth Street New York, NY 10002
Massey Klein Gallery is pleased to announce, Press Play, a musical and visual exhibition curated and produced by Willie Green. Producer Willie Green’s latest project uses a unique software process that converts an image into sound, effectively allowing him to sample select artwork from the gallery’s roster of artists. After importing images of each painting, print, or drawing, visual qualities of the art are translated into complex audio waveforms that are then manipulated into distinct instrumental sounds, including drums, synths, and more. Armed with only these avant-garde tones, Green has composed an original album, Press Play, that has been directly created from each work of art and is also a sonic expression of his own interpretation of each piece. During the exhibition reception on June 21st, the album will be played in its entirety throughout the gallery. During the remainder of the exhibition, visitors to the gallery will be encouraged to listen to each of the ten tracks composed in response to the artwork. Curation of the exhibition will follow the album’s track development, starting with Song 1 in the front gallery. Near each painting, there will be headphones installed to experience the musical compositions. Visual artists whose work will be included in the exhibition are Giulia Dall’Olio, Michael Holman, Stephane Joannes, Martine Johanna, Garrett Klein, Matthew Larson, Wouter Nijland, and Laura Sallade. Paul “Willie Green” Womack is a Brooklyn-based record producer and audio engineer, and a mainstay of the independent Hip-Hop scene. One of the sonic architects of the sub-genre known as “Art-Rap”, Green challenges conventions with his dense sonic landscapes, pounding drums, and innovative sampling techniques. A drummer from a young age and a graduate of Berklee College of Music, Green brings a diverse musical background including jazz, classical, and soul to the dusty looped world of Hip-Hop. As a member of the Audio Engineering Society, Green also strongly promotes audio education, serving as Hip- Hop and R&B Chair of the Convention Committee and a member of the Diversity and Inclusion Committee. Willie Green and Massey Klein Gallery would like to extend special thanks to each visual artist involved in Press Play and to AKG and Harman for their generous support in providing headphones for the exhibition.
Giulia Dall’Olio, who lives and works in Bologna, Italy, creates mystical utopian landscapes rich with abstraction. Her charcoal and pastel drawings are dense with layered visual material: murky trees engulf the composition, meandering highlights of color subtly pulse through the landscape as if charged with an electric current. Beautiful washes of white and grey seem to veil the natural forms that the artist’s depicts, in reality this is a mark making technique of removing the drawing material. The works are polished yet purposefully obscured, with careful consideration given to the voids within the composition. An influential observer of popular culture and entertainment, Michael Holman is an artist, writer, filmmaker, and musician, based in New York City. A pioneer in the Downtown New York Art Scene and Uptown Hip Hop Scene, Holman founded the band Gray - an industrial atmospheric, noise group - with painter Jean-Michel Basquiat, as well as created and produced the first Hip Hop television show, Graffiti Rock in 1984. Holman paints from the point of view of a historical absurdist, a “Deconstructivist.” In his paintings, Holman strives to exploit man’s need to express ideas and emotions in documental formats, which have a propensity to convey meaning, in and of themselves, for example: flags, papal bulls, and scrolls. In 2016, Holman’s music archives and artifacts were acquired by the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts’ Jerome Robbins Dance Division in Lincoln Center and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture. Stephane Joannes’ large oil on canvas paintings depict solitary cargo ships surrounded by vast sky and water. His collection, Tankers, features large horizontal paintings of cargo ships that border on abstraction. Joannes divides his paintings into three distinct sections: the sea, the sky, and the sea vessel on the horizon. The air and water seem vast and are often blocked off with a single, bold color. His ships, on the other hand, are incredibly detailed with each drip of rust and weathering carefully articulated. These orange and brown drops reveal not only the ship’s past but also the painting’s history: they are visible evidence of the painter’s brushstrokes and artistic process. Martine Johanna is an artist known for her vivid paintings with both figurative and abstract elements. Her autobiographical works, seemingly lighthearted, explore the duality between youthful naivety and anxiety-riddled adulthood. The figures, fierce but fragile, crowd the compositions and occupy the majority of the space gazing distractedly into the beyond. Each of Johanna’s delicately rendered figures convey a sense of immersion within their own “internal psychic landscape.” The work is imbued with a mysterious narrative and sensation of knowing that each character in the work has a full and complex history that the viewer can never completely comprehend. The paintings have a signature prismatic palette, visually stimulating and playful while expressing an underlying sense of uncertainty and unrest. Garrett Klein works primarily with acrylic paint, panel, and plexiglass to create his mixed-media paintings. Klein’s physical layering of materials lends an approachable yet mysterious quality to his paintings. The interaction of each layer creates energetic movement: stacked and floating bands of color ground the airy plexiglass.
Matthew Larson received his BFA in painting in 2006 from the Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design and has since exhibited extensively across the country including the Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver. In Larson’s fiber works, the artist uses yarn to create meticulous “weavings”. Unlike traditional warp-weft weaving, individual threads of yarn are layered, by hand, into Velcro creating precise patterns and striations of color and texture. While highly minimalist in design, Larson’s tapestries provide a fresh approach to the trajectory of traditional tapestry in art history. His systematic layering conceals the artist’s hand while revealing the impactful, yet subtle, nature of the works. Dutch artist, Wouter Nijland, creates three-dimensional geometric oil paintings based on a set of chance rules and coincidence. Using a playful yet rigid system based off an x and y axis planes, the artist uses dice, coins, and coded marbles to codify and scale his compositions. The rules established for each painting also determine the gradient of the brushstroke and the border between shapes as well as the polygonal shapes themselves. The monochromatic pigment in this series of paintings are in fact a mixture of approximately 12 different shades of the primary colors: red, yellow, and blue. The heavily-mixed oil layers are thick, so one can follow the brushstrokes as they catch the light. Laura Sallade lives and works in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Sallade’s glass works explore the presence and absence of light. Through the use of controlled chemical reaction and manipulation of multiple materials, the artist creates multi-dimensional glass “paintings”. The use of negative space and her distinct style of “drawing” with light create a multi-layered surface. Despite using only two panels of glass, each work achieves intense depth and allows the viewer to meditate and reflect. The artist has completed commissions for Ritz Carlton, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Anthropologie Clothing Stores, and for the Dualtone Music Group in Nashville, TN. Sallade completed her Certificate in Sculpture from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in 2014.
Track List 1. Clarity 2. Contact 3. 1975 4. Black Panther 3D 5. Ashes 6. Floating and Stacking 7. Now My Eyes See You 8. 38.18 9. Tanker 35 10. GD ‘82
02:58 01:40 02:26 02:16 02:24 02:22 03:07 03:16 02:20 03:11
Experience the album, Press Play, here: 1.
Scan QR code with your phone’s camera to access album on Willie Green’s Bandcamp
2.
Purchase album
3.
Download onto your computer or iPhone to listen
Track One: Laura Sallade Clarity, 2017 Watercolor, pastel, graphite, hand-cut mylar, silver, glass 48 x 34 inches
Track Two:
Matthew Larson Contact, 2018 Acrylic fibers, velcro, and linon on panel 24.5 x 24 inches, framed
Track Three:
Giulia Dall’Olio g 19][75 d, 2018 charcoal on paper 39 x 27.5 inches
Track Four:
Michael Holman Black Panther 3D, 1993 Acrylic on canvas 48 x 48 inches
Track Five: Martine Johanna Ashes, 2017 Acrylic, pencil, and silver tape on wood panel, hand-poured resin finish 27.5 x 19.6 inches
Track Six:
Garrett Klein Floating and Stacking Black and Blue on Red, 2017 Acrylic on panel and plexiglass 12.5 x 10 inches
Track Seven: Laura Sallade Now my eyes sees you, 2018 Limited edition archival inkjet print on watercolor paper Ed. size: 30 12 x 9 inches
Track Eight:
Wouter Nijland 39.18, 2015 Oil on canvas 59 x 59 inches
Track Nine:
Stephane Joannes Tanker 35, 2018 Oil, asphalt, and glycerin on canvas 31 x 94 inches
Track Ten:
Giulia Dall’Olio g 8][2 d, 2014 Oil on engraved panel 43.5 x 36 inches
This catalogue published on the occasion of the exhibition Press Play Curated by Willie Green June 21 - August 24, 2019 Massey Klein Gallery 124 Forsyth Street New York, NY 10002 www.masseyklein.com
Š2019 Massey Klein Gallery All rights reserved. No part of this publication shall be reprinted or reproduced in any form without written permission from Massey Klein Gallery or the artists. Installation Photos: JP Rodriguez