Eating Peanuts
 

July 29 - August 19, 2014
Monday - Thursday, 12 - 7pm
Opening Tuesday July 29, 6 - 8pm

195 Chrystie St.
Room 501B
New York, NY 10002
 

Offsite is pleased to announce Eating Peanuts, its inaugural exhibition. The show brings together an intergenerational group of artists addressing shifting methodologies, aesthetics, and working models. Established artists such as Frederick Hammersley and Marlene McCarty coexist alongside Cynthia Plaster Caster, who first gained recognition outside of the art world, and Enzo Shalom an emerging artist currently studying at Bard College.

The title of the show is borrowed from an interview with Frederick Hammersley. While discussing the process of his “computer drawings” he remarked, “it was like eating peanuts. I mean, one thing led to another, and you just kept on chewing.”

Fredrick Hammersley (1919 - 2009) began his series of “computer drawings” in 1969. Hammersley employed computer technology to make drawings using the 26 letters of the alphabet, 10 numerals and 11 symbols. The images that resulted were geometrical compositions that featured a variety of forms including squares, circles, diamonds, zigzags, arches, curves and waves as well as all-over patterning. The combinations seemed endless, and Hammersley reveled in exploring nuances, making unique variations of images that he favored.

Marlene McCarty (b. 1957) in her text based paintings from the early 1990s, McCarty used a domestic iron to heat-transfer text onto raw canvas. The grandiose scale and composition allude to Barnett Newman’s “zip” while simultaneously resembling racing stripes on the hoods of cars. The content of the messages adopt a heavy female voice antithetical to the historically male arena of heroic abstract painting.

Cynthia Plaster Caster, (b. 1947) an artist and self-described recovering groupie began plaster casting the genitals of famous rock stars in the late 1960s. Her ritualistic approach underlines the pagan practice of the fetishistic focus on these celebrities. She features a plaster cast of Jimi Hendrix from 1968, titled “Sweet Baby Jimi.”

Enzo Shalom (b. 1993)