Exhibition

Sean Micka

31 Jan 2019 – 2 Mar 2019

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Josee Bienvenu is pleased to present Sean Micka’s first solo exhibition with the gallery.

About

The exhibition includes two new bodies of work: a collection of oil paintings based on selected objects from auction catalogues and a group of charcoal drawings documenting the various states of silver and portraits. The works navigate questions of value, labor and desire, production and circulation, authenticity and provenance, and the psychological investment we project onto personal and private inanimate objects.

Upon entering the space, a collection of oil paintings unfolds onto the wall and reads as a continuous strip. The paintings are based on print auction catalogs, namely Christie’s and Sotheby’s, of fine antique silver and luxury jewelry. The catalogues span from the early-1970’s to the late-1990’s. They contain all analog photography and period-specific graphic design, typography, and layout. They depict spoons, ladles, diamonds, emeralds and sapphires. Easily mistaken for photographs, the paintings  ask the viewer to take a second, longer look, resisting the kind of cursory viewing prevalent today. The titles alone, drawn verbatim from the object and lot descriptions, are often difficult to read, resist easy reproduction, and often cause confusion. They require the viewer to slow down and reconsider what they are looking at. Why this, why now? Painted with high fidelity to realism, they become aesthetic objects of labor themselves, mapping out a paradoxical connection to the functions of authorship. On one hand, they are close reproductions or appropriations of readymade images. On the other hand, they represent the labor, time and material substances that went into them, creating a “third object” after the original one and the photograph, haunting the original, a history with multiple temporalities.

Across the room, a series of charcoal drawings documents the process of transformation of natural elements, rocks, minerals, the stuff of the earth which through skilled labor turns into coveted and fetishized objects of high exchange-values. The drawings show silver in various states: ingot, crystal, mineral, industrial sheets, as well as  portraits of the deceased patrons whose collections and estates were sold in auction during the same era. Lastly, there is a drawing of a group portrait captured in 1879 of General U.S. Grant, miners and prospectors celebrating upon finding a giant lode of silver. Taken together, they constitute a typology of figures: silver and gems; and a genealogy of authors and caretakers: collections and collectors. Reflecting on the immanent dimensions of the artwork itself, questions of authorship and stewardship, and drawing on a history of theory, critique, and praxis — in particular the work of Andrea Fraser, Louise Lawler, Sherry Levine, Mary Kelly, and Gerhard Richter — Sean Micka’s work comments and reflects on its own  form and content  and  on institutionalization — circulation and exchange, auction and collection — creating another cycle of displacements and condensation, references and intersecting narratives.

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Sean Micka

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