Chris Esposito​:​ Wall Sandwich

About

An opening reception will take place Friday, June 18th at the gallery from 6-9 PM in our new location in the center hallway at the 56 Bogart Street in Brooklyn, NY. The solo show presents new work featuring industrial materials at a range of scales, making visible what is regularly invisible in the surrounding environment.

This exhibition shows the artist’s inspiration in dialogue with Gordon Matta-Clark’s practice from the 1970s engaging with New York City’s spaces of decay by highlighting dilapidated buildings and condemned architecture. In these works, Matta-Clark cut into sections of his birth city’s urban landscape to reveal its “anarchitecture.” In Wall Sandwich, Esposito has taken up the mantle of what could be called the "Anti-Matta-Clark" - not because he is operating as the opposite of Matta-Clark, but because his is an intervention that reveals the material composition of these removed sections. Esposito concentrates on the interior and exterior of the walls, the space in between, the endless layers of palimpsest both polished and tarnished. It is a study of the soul of New York City, and as such Esposito takes the matter and material of those Matta-Clark interventional cuts and places this detritus into the context of the white cube contemporary art gallery.

Works on view in Wall Sandwich combine layers of found materials from locations across New York City, exerting the poignant presence of lived environments from the city’s neighborhoods and bringing the outside in to confront the viewer. This makes it impossible for the viewer to escape the truth behind Art, Capitalism, Commercialism, and Consumption and the effect it has on this City - and every other city that fails to control the juggernaut of development and capitalist "progress." Where Matta-Clark brought our attention to the cuts, Esposito focuses our gaze on the guts, where can be found the pentimenti of healing and the record of rise and fall surrounding us in the urban landscape.

Queens-based artist Chris Esposito is a native New Yorker whose practice employs an anti-aesthetic process of selecting specific found materials, which are then either constructed or deconstructed to create a juxtaposition of culture. Esposito holds an MFA from Queens College and currently teaches Studio Art at both Queens College and SUNY Maritime. in the past he has been known to make a racket with other like minded individuals in basements and lofts that culminated in a recording studio with a subsequent album. He concluded the business of music and keeping a band together wasn’t cutting it and made a career shift to the physical manifestation of paintings and objects. With a hermetic approach to his studio practice he often finds escape from the city on his motorcycle. 

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Image: “Wall Sandwich” (2021) Wood, fresco, oil paint, metal, tar, tar paper, cement blocks and bricks; 43 x 62 x 9.5”