Wet Eyes

Zak Arctander

Daniel Klaas Beckwith

Joseph Buckley

Jonathan Mildenberg

Curated by Sarah Meyohas

Meyohas is pleased to present the group exhibition Wet Eyes. The works assembled in this exhibition tackle the issue of authenticity of experience, in a variety of methodologies and strategies that alternately rhyme and contrast. These are works that treat the straight recounting of lived experience with suspicion and recast everyday phenomena with artistic interventions within the familiar setting of an apartment space.

The Taconic State Parkway (often simply referred to as the Taconic or TSP), is a 104-mile highway in the state of New York. It follows a generally northward route midway between the Hudson River and the Connecticut and Massachusetts state lines. This road constitutes a significant portion of Zak Arctander’s regular commute from New York to Massachusetts. Arctander unpacks the nature of the commute in the video Taconic. Touching upon themes of the rural, the metropolitan, addiction, and aspiration in a series of charged tableaus, Arctander conflates his own personal history with a mysterious tragedy.

In the kitchen area of the gallery is a carpet that extends from wall to wall. It is a work by Daniel Klaas Beckwith. Upon this carpet are a series of stains. A casual glance, directed at said stains, might not reveal much, a glimpse into passive and unkempt domestic accident -- unremarkable, incidental, and ubiquitous. However, if one were to pay the stains an art-­like attention, the regularity of these spills, their placement, and their shapes might eject such a familiar, mundane reading. Upon more rigorous inspection, esoteric informations might be deciphered. However, such readings require an otherwise unnatural amount of attention to be paid to a set of spills on carpets. Such is the formal quality of these stains upon this carpet that such interpretation becomes choice­-like. It becomes a responsibility of the viewer to decide the extent to which these suspicious stains unfold themselves as regards genesis, how deeply they elucidate themselves as regards meaning. In an inverted gesture, in the room preceding the kitchen, Beckwith has removed what appears to be a bag of Lucky Charm cereal from its protecting box. The bag has been gently opened, so as not to fully break its seal, and then placed upon the hardwood floor.

In the main room of the exhibition space, the windows have been blacked out. With matte black self-adhesive vinyl, each windowpane is obscured and a perpetual nighttime, 2 microns thick, is enacted. This is Joseph Buckley’s Pervert’s Lament (its title taken from an earlier body of Buckley’s work), a gesture of introversion that forces everything else in the main room to exist in artificial light. Opposite these windows, in the next room, Buckley has hung a framed print upon the wall. The print features a small body of text that addresses the view from an alternate and ambiguous reality.

An institution exerts power. It does so in many ways: in the execution of its institutional role (whatever that may be), in its dealings with the world at large, or in the requirements it lays at the feet of its employees--whose fungible labor enables the appearance of facelessness that is integral to the very institution­ness of the institution. However, despite this veneer of institutional sterility, of clean inhumanity, every institution is punctuated by an inescapable human need–toilets. It is here, in this space of human punctuation, that Jonathan Mildenberg sites his work for Wet Eyes. Mildenberg shows the work Conversations, an odd and orphaned simulation of an institutional restroom (sans toilet and sink), that simultaneously short­circuits and reifies these strategies of institutional power. By presenting the restroom – site of the embarrassing, the urological, the private, the scatological – shorn free of the toilet, Mildenberg at once ‘de­fangs’ the institution whilst commenting on the human need for sanctuary in desperate times and the desperation that can provide sanctuary in otherwise inhospitable places.

Zak Arctander (b.1986, American) lives and works in New York and Massachusetts. Recent group exhibitions include Inside the Episode at Launch F18 in New York City, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter at Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco.

Daniel Klaas Beckwith (b.1988, American) lives and works in New York City. Recent group exhibitions include Most Loathed at 3401 Lee Street in Los Angeles, A Small Group Show of American and British Artists at Space Space Gallery in Tokyo, Vacancy at Motel in New York City.

Joseph Buckley (b.1990, British) lives and works in New York City. Recent group exhibitions include Most Loathed at 3401 Lee Street in Los Angeles, A Small Group Show of American and British Artists at Space Space Gallery in Tokyo, Running Up That Building and Diving Into That Pool at 240 Camberwell Road in London.

Jonathan Mildenberg (b.1980, American) lives and works in New York City. Recent group exhibitions include Video Mixer at Green Gallery in Yale University, TIME ITEM at Green Gallery in Yale University, For Here or to Go at Ed Varie in New York City. In 2015, Mildenberg was a nominee in Sculpture for the Toby Devan Lewis Fellowship.

Meyohas is an artist-run apartment gallery in the Upper East Side.