Baer Ridgway Exhibitions is pleased to present three new solo exhibitions by Lindsey White, Nao Bustamante & David Kasprzak - all opening June 19th at 4pm.
Lindsey White:
Working in still photography, video and sculpture, Lindsey White offers subtle and often humorous insights into questions of truth vs illusion, found vs fabricated and synchronicity vs chaos. Her manipulations of materials...
[read more] Baer Ridgway Exhibitions is pleased to present three new solo exhibitions by Lindsey White, Nao Bustamante & David Kasprzak - all opening June 19th at 4pm.
Lindsey White:
Working in still photography, video and sculpture, Lindsey White offers subtle and often humorous insights into questions of truth vs illusion, found vs fabricated and synchronicity vs chaos. Her manipulations of materials and settings, by both analog and digital means, mixed with a keen eye for coincidence make for playful yet haunting images of the not so mundane everyday.
Lindsey White lives and works in San Francisco. She received her BFA in Photography from the Pacific Northwest College of Art (Portland, OR) and her MFA in Photography from the California College of Art (San Francisco, CA). She has exhibited recently at the Pacific Northwest College of Art (Portland, OR), Southern Exposure (San Francisco, CA), the Kala Institute of Art (Berkeley, CA), and the Headlands Center for the Arts (Marin, CA).
Nao Bustamante:
Baer Ridgway Exhibitions is pleased to present Deathbed, an exhibition of performance, photography, installation and video by renowned artist, Nao Bustamante.
"Like many children I had an obsession with death and the idea of not being or being transformed into something else all together. I would lie in bed at night and imagine myself, dead, in my satin lined casket and would try to breathe very shallow to bring about a thin state of being, a sliver of awareness of being inside and outside of my body at the same time. Conjuring the worked up emotional state of my family and friends, in mourning, as they passed to pay their respects, I'd console them from above.
In 2003, I joined thousands of other pilgrims at the Frank E. Campbell Funeral Home at Madison Avenue and 81st Street in Manhattan to see the queen of salsa, Celia Cruz, lie in state. The image of Celia on her post-mortem tour burned into my mind. She was wearing all cream colored garments and had pearl shaded nail polish and held a gold crucifix. She "slept" in a cream colored satin interior, and bronze exterior coffin. Her hair, which was colored in her signature golden hues, was arranged like a sleeping mermaid on the pillow, her eyes were shut with brush of silver shadow. Her lips carried a faint and restful smile. Celia was prepared to die and arranged much of the tableau. In Deathbed, I continue the mediation of childhood, but attempt to call up the precise moment at which a life is exiting the body; the surprise and release of leaving." - Nao Bustamante
Nao Bustamante is an internationally known and loved artist, originally from California, she now resides in New York. There she canoes with her poodle, Fufu (who also has an IMDB page). Bustamante's precarious work encompasses performance art, video installation, visual art, filmmaking and writing. The New York Times says, "She has a knack for using her body." Bustamante has presented in Galleries, Museums, Universities and underground sites all around the world. She has exhibited, among other locales, at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, the New York Museum of Modern Arts, Sundance 2008, 2010, and the Kiasma Museum of Helsinki. In 2001 she received the prestigious Anonymous Was a Woman fellowship and in 2007 named a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow, as well as a Lambent Fellow. Currently, Bustamante holds the position of Associate Professor of New Media and Live Art at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
David Kasprzak:
"In a decaying society, art, if it is truthful, must also reflect decay. And unless it wants to break faith with its social function, art must show the world as changeable."
-Ernst Fischer
Baer Ridgway presents Bless This Mess, an exhibition by artist/ curator David Kasprzak. The exhibition of drawings, photo-assemblages, sculpture, and collected ephemera illustrates the destruction and decay of materials and ideologies. Bless This Mess examines the role and importance of destruction in art and contemporary society as more of a mode of transformation than a memento mori.
Drawing inspiration from the destructive art of Gustav Metzger, Jean Tinguely, and other artists of the 50's and 60's, Kasprzak's work shares the philosophy that destruction is a necessary part of existence in a contemporary society. In Metzger's words, "Auto-destructive art is primarily a form of public art for industrial societies. Self-destructive painting, sculpture and construction is a total unity of idea, site, form, colour, method and timing of the disintegrative process". Rather than taking a fatalistic stance on the future, Bless This Mess proposes that we view the decay and entropy around us as a cleansing, a simultaneous creative and destructive force. It asks us to find a Nietzschesque "joyful destruction" or a cathartic outlet in which to generate a hopeful future from the rubble.
David Kasprzak was raised in Eastern Tennessee. He received his BFA from the Columbus College of Art and Design in Columbus, Ohio, and later went on to study ancient art history and Italian cinema in Florence, Italy. Kasprzak is currently working on his MA at the California College of Art in Curatorial Practice.
