Egregore by Gregory Kaplowitz

About

Transmitter presents:

Egregore

GREGORY KAPLOWITZ

AUGUST 3 – SEPTEMBER 9, 2018

OPENING RECEPTION FRIDAY, AUGUST 3, 6–9 PM

Transmitter Gallery is pleased to present the first solo exhibition in New York of San Francisco–based artist Gregory Kaplowitz.

Kaplowitz sees his art practice as mirroring the occult concept of the egregore, a sort of psychic entity in which energy across time comes together, that can be tapped into to draw upon accumulated power, knowledge, and wisdom. Using photographic processes to access the egregore, he reveals what isn’t readily noticeable in his subject matter, creating images that are eerily suggestive of another world trying to enter our own, present but not immediately apparent, much as the queer gaze might be embedded in an abstract image.

These works display Kaplowitz’s flair for mixing cyanotype emulsion with elements of painting. As the cyanotype photograms become a substrate for painting, they are in a sense clothed, shrouded in textiles that have been manipulated, even to the point of being unraveled. The resultant works blur the distinction between objects and images, disrupting the traditional media separations among painting, photography, textiles, and sculpture.

In more recent works, the use of the window frame evokes the border between nature and the hearth, the wild and the tamed, a paradox that lies within a queer identity. Again and again Kaplowitz returns to the fold, both literally, and, as Deleuze tells us in Le Pli, as a representation of “the reason and the motor of an autonomous power that makes sense,” like the egregore, offering help in revealing what has been hiding in plain sight.

Gregory Kaplowitz is an artist living out of San Francisco and working with photographic processes, painting, and textiles. Since earning a double BFA at The California College of the Arts in San Francisco, Gregory Kaplowitz has participated in exhibitions at: Interface in Oakland, Gray Contemporary in Houston, Minnesota Street Project, 2nd Floor Projects, C2C Project Space, and Root Division in (all San Francisco). His video works have been screened in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Santa Fe, Austin, New York City, Montreal, Berlin and Australian public access television. In 2015, his work was included in issue #121 of New American Paintings. Also in 2015, he participated in a residency at The League Residency at Vyt in New York in conjunction with The Art Students’ League Of New York and with support from a Ruth Katzman Scholarship award. In 2018, he attended a residency at the Vermont Studio Center thanks to receiving their fellowship award.