Organic Situation

A.L. Steiner, Denise Kupferschmidt, Geoff Hendricks, Jonathan Bruce Williams, Kelly Jazvac, Margaret Honda, Miljohn Ruperto, Paul Ramirez Jonas, Peter Dreher, Peter Scott, Tyler Coburn, Zoe Ghertner

July 16, 2015 – August 21, 2015 459 West 19th Street

Organic Situation: Installation View 2015

A.L. Steiner and robbinschilds with AJ Blandford and Kinski, Organic Situation — Organic Situation: A.L. Steiner and robbinschilds with AJ Blandford and Kinski 2007

Peter Dreher, Organic Situation, Installation View — Organic Situation: Peter Dreher Installation View Installation View

A.L. Steiner & Robbin Childs, Organic Situation — Organic Situation: A.L. Steiner & Robbin Childs still from C.L.U.E.(#21) 2007

Organic SItuation:Tyler Coburn Waste Management 2013-2015 print take away, Installation View

Tyler Coburn, Waste Management — Organic Situation:Tyler Coburn Waste Management 2013-2015 found artwork made of CRT Monitor glass, epoxy and fiber powder from printed circuit boards

Paul Ramirez Jonas, I Create As I Speak — Organic Situation: Paul Ramirez Jonas I Create as I Speak 616 sheets of office paper, Inkjet ink This is a moon made of paper. The sentence I create as I speak is repeated over and over again, in a 616 page-long text. The sentence is written in such a way that when the pages are all pinned to the wall they form a twenty-foot image of the moon. One page, a fragment of the image, is removed from the wall and deposited on a lectern. The public is invited to read this piece of the moon (out loud or to themselves). The incantation I create as I speakis either the ultimate act of hubris, or it represents belief in our capacity to create.

Press Release

Koenig & Clinton is pleased to announce Organic Situation, a group exhibition that parses ideas about human relationships to both organic and engineered environments. Our contemporary moment is one of the network society, in which our increasingly mediated experience of the “natural world” is blurred between the visual and the real. Organic Situation offers varying perspectives on the interdependent roles of biology and technology in shaping perception, experience and creative production.

Consulting nature through language, image and speech act, Paul Ramirez Jonas mounts a grid of 185 printed sheets of paper to form Paper Moon ( I Create as I Speak) (2008). A single excerpted sheet of the text reading “I create as I speak” rests on a lectern, inviting an incantation.

Two paintings by Denise Kupferschmidt draw on Advertising, architecture and design elements fro the early 20th Century to render “Universal figures against graphic imagery of urban geometries. Peter Scott’s High Line Billboard #1 (2015) offers a telling view of visitors framed by a now-iconic architectural feature on the local High Line park. Zoē Ghertner’s False Fronts diptych captures the aspirational facades of the rural American West.

Assembling topologies out of discarded advertisement vinyl, Kelly Jazvac’s sculptural works coax new questions about landscape and disposability. Resembling natural rock formations, the digital lumps of Tyler Coburn’s Waste Management ( 2013-2014) memorialize technological by products.

A grid of oil paintings by Peter Dreher depicts light at regular intrevals on one alpine rige over several days’ time. Also in line with German Romanticism, Miljohn Ruperto’s lenticular photograph Do Your Best ( 2014) attempts to convey Caspar Davi Friedrich’s seminal painting, the Sea Of Ice (1823-1824) in a newer medium.

Trading in the visual language of myths, rituals, dreams and photographic documentation, Geoffrey Henrick’s Fluxus headstand performances invert the body’s relationship to land, sea and sky. Meanwhile the collaborative single channel video and performance C.L.U.E. ( Color Location Ultimate Experience) ( 2007) by A.L Steiner + ribbinschilds follows sentient bodies into the outdoors.