Table Service

Nina Blass

Aaron Eidman

Mackenzie Huber

Manning Jordan

Annie Klebanoff

Table Service brings together the work of five New York City-based artists working in a variety of mediums with a common interest in hospitality, the service industry, and the people defining the beloved and often bizarre communal spaces that make up much of the city. These artists have come together to examine the public domesticity experienced at counters and tables, the nature of its production and its participants.

The exhibition explores the personal relationships of three of the five artists to the industry and provides a platform for their individual expressions and reinterpretations of the iconography and materials intrinsic to those spaces (as with Mackenzie Huber's drawings on server notepads) and the rituals of restaurant service (in Manning Jordan's portraits and Annie Klebanoff's photography).

The show also features the work of two ceramicists (Nina Blass and Aaron Eidman), presented on tables and formed by repetition, chance, and high temperatures — both like and entirely unlike food preparation.

An homage to hospitality and to the liminal spaces it superimposes onto the city's ordinary rhythms, Table Service is a tribute to an often-strange world easily taken for granted.

Nina Blass

Nina Blass is a ceramicist and sculptor working in stoneware and porcelain. Her work ranges from playful tableware exploring the movement of one glaze combination across surface textures to figural sculptures of women smoking, dancing, reading, and falling.

Aaron Eidman

Aaron Eidman makes hand-built ceramic vessels that are informed by painting and textiles. Repetition and chance are central to his work.

Mackenzie Huber

Mackenzie Huber is a self-taught artist with a heavy focus on drawing and collage. Working in service for many years, she incorporates materials found directly in her workplace and repurposes them in an attempt to give them artistic meaning. Her work is surreal and weighted with an undercurrent of longing, always drawing inspiration from the natural world. She explores the relationship between her life in the workplace and feelings of freedom, her daily conscious experiences and explorations of the subconscious. Despite her complicated relationship with service, she believes she will return to serve in her old age at a diner where she got her start.

Manning Jordan

In parallel to her work as a playwright, Manning Jordan maintains a painting practice that serves as a visual medium for her invention of characters and a means of exploring actual people she encounters in her daily life.

Her primary subject matter is derived from her experience in the service industry. She has generated over 40 portraits of people employed at Achilles Heel, a bar and restaurant in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, where she bartends, serves, and hosts. Studying at New York School of the Arts, she has had the opportunity to experiment with canvas sizes and various mediums in order to showcase other explorations within the theme of table service.

Annie Klebanoff

Annie Klebanoff is a Brooklyn-based photographer.

Her images span still life, portraiture, and landscape and explore moments of beauty and oddity in every-day life.

She spends part of her time working in the hospitality industry and is both enmeshed within and passionate about the community that defines it. She also finds great inspiration in the designs of these shared spaces.