Past Exhibition

Mira Schor

Chthonic Garden

October 19, 2013 – December 8, 2013
Artist Talk: Saturday, October 19, 4 p.m.
Artist Reception: Saturday, October 19, 5 – 7 p.m.

CB1 Gallery is pleased to present our second solo exhibition of work by Mira Schor, Chthonic Garden. In her newest work Schor continues to explore her unique combination of visual pleasure and painterly craft with philosophical, existential, and political concerns. The exhibition will be on view from October 19 – December 8, 2013. An artist talk will be held on Saturday October 19 at 4 p.m. followed by a reception for the artist from, 5 – 7 p.m.

In a series of new paintings and drawings Mira Schor addresses the terms of contemporary psychic, theoretical, and economic spaces as they affect creativity. The central theme in these paintings is the experience of living in a moment of radical inequality, austerity, and accelerated time, set against the powerful pull of older notions of time, craft, and visual pleasure.

Schor places her characteristic avatar of self on the line of the earth as a demarcation line between sky and earth, austerity and fertility, public and private. The paintings express what it is like to be engaged in the world “right this minute.” They focus on reversals and reversibility, where underground, the matter of earth itself, the Chthonic, can also become the sky and the sky above can become the ground below.

In some works Schor’s figure reads under a tree, where nature is a situation, a shallow proscenium in which to diagram thought. In paintings exploring the regenerative powers of the earth, her figure sleeps in the ground, while in others the figure is not resting in the earth of her own volition, she’s been thrown there head first, whether by corporate downsizing, unemployment, climate-caused displacement, or expropriation of bodies of knowledge that are deemed obsolete. Yet in these paintings Schor explores a radiant engagement with nature and looks to a reversal between the dream and the real.

In the New York Times, Roberta Smith has described Mira Schor’s “small, sharp, quirky paintings” as “thorns in the side of the medium,” while artist Robert Berlind, writing in Art in America, described Schor as “An intimist whose candor is akin to Emily Dickinson’s, Schor uses the sparest of means to signal, as the poet put it, “The loneliness / One dare not sound.”

Mira Schor is a New York-based artist and writer noted for her advocacy of painting in a post- medium visual culture and for her contributions to feminist art history. Her work has been included in exhibitions at the Jewish Museum in New York City, The Hammer Museum, P.S.1, the Neuberger Museum, and the Aldrich Museum. Her 2012 one-person exhibition at Marvelli Gallery was highly praised in The New York Times and it was a critic’s pick on artforum.com. Recent interviews have appeared on Art21Blog, Bomblog, Hyperallergic, artinfo and Culture Catch. She participated in ARTspace’s Annual Distinguished Artists’ Interviews at the 2013 Annual College Art Association Conference in New York. She is the author of A Decade of Negative Thinking: Essays on Art, Politics, and Daily Life (2009), Wet: On Painting, Feminism, and Art (1997; both Duke University Press), and of the blog A Year of Positive Thinking. She is the co-editor of M/E/A/N/I/N/G Online and recent writings have appeared in Artforum and The Brooklyn Rail. She recently curated the exhibition Abstract Marriage: Sculpture by Ilya Schor and Resia Schor at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum. She exhibits her work at artSTRAND in Provincetown. Schor is the recipient of many prestigious awards including a Guggenheim Fellowship in Painting, the College Art Association Frank Jewett Mather Award in Art Criticism, and the Creative Capital / Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant. She is an Associate Teaching Professor in Fine Arts at New York’s Parsons The New School for Design.

• MORE IMAGES
• INSTALLATION IMAGES