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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Michelle Segre
Lost Songs of the Filament
June 1 - June 30, 2012
Opening Reception: Friday, June 1, 6-8pm
Derek Eller Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of new sculpture by Michelle Segre.
Incorporating a variety of materials including plaster, wire, mesh, and organic matter as well as past works, Segre creates freestanding, singular pieces that transport the viewer into a spindly, off-kilter world of enigmatic presences. An overall state of flux is the driving force in this work, where each piece appears to have evolved through an accumulation of detritus, enmeshed together through the growth process of a creeping fungus. There is a juxtaposition of unexpected materials and motifs - melting blobs of plaster co-habitate with crystalline frozen metal forms. Elements the size of pushpins occupy the same structure as pitchforks and giant metal rings. Some pieces appear to contain weirdly encoded information from a fictional alien culture; in others, remnants of a procedure that has been cut short by some unseen force. An enormous chicken bone becomes a captive specimen in a primitive display apparatus of wires and rods. Strings, yarns, and other linear elements, draw through the space in and around, intersecting with amorphous bodies of papier-mâché and creating dense, web-like structures that evoke the detailed cellular patterns Segre has often used in her drawings. One work seems to be a collector, a gatherer whose tendrils ensnare the matter in its path, a meal of sculptural plankton. In another, skeletal forms encircle a center eye which is perched to receive or transmit information, the energy lines emitting into the space around it. The fat and the skinny, the flat and the bulbous, the plastic and the raw, grind against each other in a noisy, bristly racket. Segre's work hovers at an edge where everything remains fragmentary and incomplete, on the brink of coming apart, refusing to fulfill expectations in any predictable way. The process is improvisational and fluid, resulting in pieces that are both playfully casual and intense.
Michelle Segre lives and works in New York. Her work has been included in exhibitions at the Tang Teaching Museum, The Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center, and The Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art. This will be her fourth solo show with the gallery.
North Room: André Ethier, Kinda French
Derek Eller Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of new paintings by Toronto-based artist André Ethier.
In his fifth show at the gallery, André Ethier contests the borders of irony and earnestness, combining self-deprecating humor with sincere appreciation for banalities and everyday strangeness. He approaches each work without a definitive subject in mind, he improvises the content and compositions, employing an array of application techniques to create luscious, painterly surfaces. Evoking art historical precedents from Francis Picabia to Greek black-figure pottery, Ethier conjures intense imagery that is both uncanny and strikingly familiar.
André Ethier has had solo exhibitions in Los Angeles, Torino, Miami, Copenhagen, Toronto, and Madrid. His work was recently featured in Fairy Tales, Monsters, and The Genetic Imagination, Frist Center for the Visual Arts, Nashville, TN, Portraits: Cabinet de Curiosités, galerie bertrand & gruner, Geneva, Switzerland, and André Ethier and Janet Beckhouse at Neon Parc, Melbourne, Australia.
Derek Eller Gallery is located at 615 West 27th Street, between 11th and 12th Avenues. Hours are Tuesday - Saturday from 11am - 6pm. For further information or visuals, please contact the gallery at 212.206.6411 or visit www.derekeller.com.
Bill's new work