ESPALIER

MARC JANCOU CONTEMPORARY

524 WEST 24TH ST

NEW YORK, NY

APRIL 17 - MAY 22, 2010

Marc Jancou Contemporary is pleased to announce Meredith James' first solo show in New York, Espalier.

Meredith James' videos and sculptures engage architectural space and sequential narrative through a series of inversions and perceptual events. Shot in an abandoned subway station, Six uses simple in-camera techniques to recast the spatial and temporal coordinates of the experience of a passing train. Not unlike early experiments in film, James' work tends to lay bare its mechanism, preferring to acknowledge the perceptual shifts even as they occur. Carefully structured time lags are distributed between moments of recognition within the narrative structure of a video or the spatial arrangement of sculptural elements.

James' use of unconventional viewing apparatuses compounds the experience; videos are rear-projected inside homemade TVs and sculptures sit behind walls. See-Through is a tubular knot constructed of found windows, which are fit together, and then built into a temporary wall. As in her videos, James reveals the structure of the piece by creating alternate vantage points and entries into the work. The diorama titled "A stand of roadside cholla against which small birds had been driven by the storm and there impaled" may be seen either through a tiny peephole or through the prism of windows in See-Through.

PRESS:

Jonathan Goodman, “Reviews,” Sculpture, January/February 2011

Joanna Fiduccia, "Critics Picks," artforum.com, May 2010.