NADA House 2021
May 8 - August 1, 2021
de boer gallery (los angeles) is pleased to announce a three artist presentation for NADA House 2021 at Governors Island, NY. Responding to the unique context of Governors Island and the specific character of the rooms and houses on this historic property, de boer gallery will present artworks that speaks to the island’s changing identity over time and time itself with works by Suzanne McClelland; a portrait of America of those surviving on the slimmest of margins with works by Michael St. John; and labor and the body itself with works by Monsieur Zohore.
Suzanne McClelland’s non-narrative paintings foreground the presentation with works that undermine the human pursuit to understand time as a fixed truth. In these paintings, McClelland uses the roll of the dice as a system to generate a numerical guide for scratchy, washy, and chunky oil on linen paintings where numbers fly off clocks. Do you believe?, they ask while generally refusing to behave like the certainties they are supposed to be. These paintings engage with negation, hope and psychic perception suggesting a longing for the things we attempt to name but can't quite see.
Michael St. John’s paintings manifest themes of documentary long central to his practice, filtering culturally significant and insignificant flotsam to aggregate an American iconography well-versed in prosaic violence. Democracy, as rendered in this series of paintings, is not reduced to a cynical indictment of plutocratic winner-take-all politics, but a complex, panoramic, and evolving national portrait as pictured from the margins. In this series of paintings he layers newspaper clippings, found images, along with oil on canvas in a fragmented language depicting captivating portraits of America at present.
Monsieur Zohore’s paintings and sculptures make use of Bounty Paper Towels and bleach to elicit the idea of the bathetic body; toxic, wasteful and disposable as a metaphor for the treatment of marginalized domestic workers. The comedy contained within these durable yet dis-posable materials quickly transfigures itself into a drama of social inequities. The material has an intended sense of labor. The material begins to imply a labor-ing body—a typically marginalized laboring body—equally durable and disposable. His relentless images force a viewer to contemplate their own ideas of shame and their own relationship to labor.
Suzanne McClelland has exhibited extensively in the United States and abroad. Museum solos include those at the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art in Ridgefield, CT, the Weatherspoon Art Museum in North Carolina and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. Recent Publications include “Just Left Feel Right” published by the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, organized and authored by Amy Smith-Stewart; the monograph “36-24-36” published by team gallery, inc with a text by Thierry de Duve, “Playlist”, “Networth”, and A DRESS/Address a collaboration with Alix Pearlstein all published by Space Sisters Press. Her work is included in numerous public collections, among them The Museum of Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art and The Brooklyn Museum in New York City, the Yale University Art Gallery, the Albertina in Vienna and the Walker Art Center. McClelland was included in the New Museum’s NYC 1993: Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star and participated in the 1993 and 2014 Whitney Biennials. In 2019 Mcclelland was awarded the Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship.
Michael St. John has shown his work extensively over the past thirty years in museums, alternative spaces and galleries throughout the United States. Although he’s known primarily for his four exhibitions at the Andrea Rosen Gallery, other notable shows include those at team (gallery, inc.), Karma, NY, Marlborough Contemporary, Edward Cella in LA, CCS Bard, The Rubell Family Collection, The Weatherspoon Art Museum, Andrew Kreps and Feature Inc.
Monsieur Zohore is an Ivorian-American artist based in New York and Baltimore. His practice is invested in the consumption and digestion of culture through the conflation of domestic quotidian labor with art production. Through performance, sculpture, installation and theater, his practices explore queer histories alongside his Ivorian-American heritage through a multi-faceted lens of humor, economics, art history, and labor.
New Art Dealers Alliance was founded in 2002, New Art Dealers Alliance (NADA) is a not-for-profit 501c6 collective of professionals working with contemporary art. Our mission is to create an open flow of information, support, and collaboration within our field and to develop a stronger sense of community among our constituency. We believe that the adversarial approach to exhibiting and selling art has run its course. We believe that change can be achieved through fostering constructive thought and dialogue between various points in the art industry from large galleries to small spaces, non-profit and commercial alike. Through support and encouragement, we facilitate strong and meaningful relationships between our members working with new contemporary and emerging art; while enhancing the public’s interaction with contemporary art.
For further information about NADA House 2021 at Governors Island please click here.
