Christina Ray
Although Christina Ray’s self-titled gallery in on Grand Street cannot be more than 12’ x 12’, Michael Zelehoski manages to fit a couple of shelves, some old crates, several construction barricades, used pallets, a table and a chair, as well as a full picnic table inside the tiny SoHo gallery. Zelehoski has disassembled these three-dimensional quotidian objects and has confined each of them into a two-dimensional picture frame, preserving the objects’ original material, yet rendering their original purpose useless.
Although every element of the picnic table is still there (in Picnic Table, 2010) and embedded into the frame, one can no longer use it as a piece of furniture. It has been reduced to a visual element to be placed on a wall, rather than a shared object placed in the grass in a park. Perhaps does Zelehoski render these unwanted, discarded materials (old barricades, pallets, etc) more precious in reducing them to a two-dimensional, artistic element? In the October 2010 issue of Artforum, Giuseppe Penone says “sculpture is volume, and lives in space, while painting is surface, two-dimensionality.” In these terms, Zelehoski has painted all of his subjects without even picking up a paintbrush.
Zelehoski ultimately is delving into a study of “objecthood”, questioning and confronting the existence of each object (a table, a chair, etc) and their intended purposes (to eat, to sit, etc). The artist has subjectively titled each piece as Box, Ladders, Pallet, etc; however, these titles are simply signifiers, and once the original object has been broken down and reassembled in an eventually skewed perspective, do these signifiers still hold?
I believe that fundamentally, Zelehoski has presented the viewer with a good humored body of work, and has created a “clown car” show; a jam-packed exhibition of sculpture/painting in a pocket-sized gallery, leaving no room for empty space, both physically and philosophically.
