Smack Mellon is pleased to present Isidro Blasco’s large scale installation, Tilted, and Rachel Beach’s newest series of painting-sculptures and silkscreens in Distance Trance.
Madrid-born New York-based artist Isidro Blasco creates photographic sculptures and multimedia installations composed of images of places where he has lived, worked and visited. In Tilted, Blasco creates perspectival fragmentations of Smack Mellon’s gallery space alongside a prismatic recreation of a Dumbo streetscape. Photographs taken from multiple perspective points are combined to create mosaic-like patterns and are then mounted onto three dimensional ramshackle constructions built from repurposed wood. The installation which fills the main gallery space provides a dramatic and unusual mirror image of the gallery’s unique architecture.
Re-imagining the basics of structure and image, Rachel Beach’s skillfully constructed architectonic objects curiously hover between sign and real, visible and invisible. Highlighting the tension between artificial and natural, Beach’s new series of sculptures methodically combine contrasting surfaces of trompe l’oeil veneers with salvaged construction beams left in their aged condition. Brightly painted edges carve out illusions of space from the chunky cuts of wood. In dialogue with the sculptures are new silkscreens in which monochromatic patterns of formal geometric abstraction become symbols of space.
This exhibition is made possible with public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs and the New York State Council on the Arts, and with generous support from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, The Concordia Foundation and Smack Mellon’s Members. Smack Mellon’s programs are also made possible with public funds from the National Endowment for the Arts and New York City Council Member Stephen Levin, and with generous support from The New York Community Trust, The Greenwall Foundation, The Robert Lehman Foundation, Jerome Foundation, Lambent Foundation Fund of the Tides Foundation, Bloomberg, The Greenwich Collection LTD, Milton and Sally Avery Arts Foundation Inc., Helena Rubinstein Foundation, Brooklyn Community Foundation, 2010 JPMorgan Chase Regrant Program administered by the Brooklyn Arts Council, The Mary Duke Biddle Foundation and Foundation for Contemporary Arts. Isidro Blasco’s exhibition is made possible with the support of Spain Culture New York, the Cultural Department of the Consulate General of Spain in New York.
Space for Smack Mellon’s programs is generously provided by the Walentas family and Two Trees Management.
