Days and Dailies

Exhibition View

Days and Dailies features the work of Bronlyn Jones, Agnes Martin, Claes Oldenburg, Kay Rosen and Sarah Sze.  The exhibition uses calendars, newspapers and the progression of time as its source of structure and inspiration.

Kay Rosen’s video work, “Blue Monday”, uses the systematic sequence of combining every day of the week with each of six colors in order to explore the alternatives to the colloquialism, “Blue Monday”.  This also creates an opportunity for viewers to further explore the poetic and personal associations of colors and days.  Rosen’s piece begins on “Blue” Monday (the text always stays white, but the background is always the color denoted in the title displayed) and cycles through 6 colors over the course of 7 weeks, taking 42 days to return to “Blue” Monday, all the while, the viewer experiences Orange Thursday, Green Friday, Yellow Saturday and 38 others.  By adding these other colors and days of the week, the potential readings of all the combinations are vast.  In addition, “Blue Monday” comes back to being JUST “Blue Monday”.  What does that mean for one’s outlook?  How can one think differently? …  Barbara Krakow Gallery is proud to announce this work’s publication as a continuous loop DVD in an edition of 100.

Agnes Martin’s 6 exquisite silkscreens from the 1973 series, “On a Clear Day” (recently on view at the Agnes Martin retrospective at the Tate Modern, London, traveling to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York), demonstrate the artist’s delicate yet strong control of proportion and scale, while allowing the opportunity for a viewer to progress through slight variations, each distinct and constantly relative.  Between works, one can appreciate the larger aesthetic decisions, but within each individual work, one notices both the repetition of forms, but also the specific alterations that occur on account of placement within the overall composition, thus making the works appear absolute and contingent at the same time.

Sarah Sze’s 2015 collaged work consists of a reproduction of the front and back covers of the January 1, 2014 New York Times.  The newspaper page has been scanned, re-printed and laser-cut to both reproduce the irregular edges of the newspaper and to remove all photographic images.  What remains is the news of the day with 6 rectangles cut out, each a different size.  Behind the image of the newspaper is a photograph of a deep blue evening sky, which could be mistaken for a dark or even solid black.  However, variations in the color and subtle light sources in the sky continue from window to window, thus helping the viewer understand that it is 1, not six photos.  The ‘news’, timeliness, the infinite and the interconnectedness of everything are merely a few of the themes engaged.

Claes Oldenburg’s “The Office” was made in 1974.  The imagery, very simply, was created by typing all the words that describe the sounds one hears in an office.  Printed as a lithograph utilizing 5 colors, the sounds are layered on top of each other, but also spread out on the page.  Monotony is balanced by cacophony, all of which, in Oldenburg’s eyes, could in fact be a symphony of the sounds of daily office activity.

Bronlyn Jones’ three collages each utilize seemingly solid monochromatic areas of newsprint.  Some areas have no printing, others have full black ink coverage.  The artist has carefully cropped and adhered the clippings.  She altered them with colored lines and expanses of wax, each used ever so sparingly.  Overlooked areas of newspapers, devoid of news, become the central foci for these works.  Upon close inspection, one can see the processes of the industrial printing, the fibers of the paper and subtle differences in gradation that occur not only from the ink and artistic additions, but the undulations, creases and overlaps that occur through handling and adhering one piece to another.