Stewart Uoo

Curtains

Jan 16 – Feb 14, 2016

47 Canal291 Grand St, 2nd Floor, Chinatown

In Curtains, Stewart Uoo cannibalizes casual menswear, from sweats, fleece, fatigues and polos, in order to string up the male form as window décor. These curtains, which revisit an earlier body of work, hang on flocked plasma-cut steel finial capped hardware derived from window treatments commonly found in department store displays as well as from the decorative appliqué of men’s trousers, embroidery, ornaments from metal fencing, and design elements from contemporary painting. These curtains are framed throughout the exhibition by newly constructed windows that allow the viewer multiple access points to previously separated and hidden sections of the gallery.

Uoo refers to each curtain as a “moment” in a nod to the work of his former professor at California College of the Arts, Franklin Williams, whose own “moments” (as the artist titles his wall-based soft sculpture) hang within the exhibition. While Williams exhibited widely in the mid-60s, his work being included in exhibitions at SF MoMA and the Whitney Museum of American Art, Curtains is his first New York showing since 1975. Throughout his career, Williams has produced a variety of abstract soft sculpture as well as flat and graphical work that often abstract (and obsess over) an idiosyncratic, near-alien biology—of human genitalia, bugs, feathers, flora, and fauna—into a flat, pop symbolism with a spindly, almost arachnid complexity. In A Dark Beautiful Moment (1973), for example, Williams frames a pyramidal form amid two bulbous hearts paired with twinned crescent moons under an eye-like view into an eerie landscape of swaying palm trees. In another moment, Williams’ work hangs and droops off the wall with a fuzzy consciousness that obtains a vivid, but delicately embodied presence.

Joining the exhibition are photographs of Contessa Stuto, a musician and performer best known for her intense, jocular performances, she describes herself on her Tumblr as “indulgent... lyrical assassination/outside of society; and inside the fucked up mind of contessa’s political corruptness, & feminist dick loving queer(ist) dimension/demention”. In these new works, Uoo creates a fashion editorial specific to the gallery’s storage room, office, and fire escape that recasts Stuto as a rogue gallerina in the resurgent art world of Chinatown. Well-dressed and turned up, she rains packing peanuts on the packaged art, lounges on the director’s desk, and leans out the fire escape, a few improbable strands of baby’s breath tousled in her hair.

Stewart Uoo (b. 1985) lives and works in New York. His work is currently included in Greater New York at MoMA PS1, New York, NY and has exhibited at ICA, London; Museum Fridericianum, Kassel; Künstlerhaus, Vienna; Halle für Kunst & Median, Graz; 10th Gwangju Biennale, Gwangju, Korea; SMK Museum, Copenhagen, Denmark; Kunsthall Oslo, Norway; Elaine MGK, Basel and White Columns, New York, amongst others. In 2013 he had his first two person museum exhibition, Outside Inside Sensibility with Jana Euler, curated by Jay Sanders at the Whitney Museum of American Art. His work is included the collection of The Whitney Museum of American Art, NY collection and is a 2015 recipient of the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award.

Special thanks to Franklin and Carol Williams, Contessa Stuto, Benedict Brink, Spencer Morgan Taylor @ Harbinger Creative, Wesley O' Meara, Allie Smith, Mark Jen Hsu, Sven Hana, Andres Caballero, Ben Rosenberg, Lyndsea Lamarr, Rian Pickell, Roxy Farman, Butch Hogan, Leeora Empire, Natalie de Segonzac, Andrew Durbin

Here I see through all the "delusions" (dreams)

Delusions or a Dream...

It's only a battle (VS) of the puppetry.

Call it a Desire "to be or not to be." Me.

I've eaten these fruits, self mirrored by the Ego A star falling into another dimension.

The meek infidel call it "Insanity,"

but deep into the realms are the reality

Others are what I call "daylight ghosting."

"Not a Face" (all dressed up) + Visibility (Social Media) = STILL NOT A PERSON BITCH!

The over sensationalism of mediocrity.

Beauty is the perversion of youth

Destroyed by the system