Sack of Bones at Peres Projects (Chinatown) presents work that resists, defies and denies the norm, traditional aesthetic beauty and focuses on “a sack of bones” which is deemed as useless, deformed and dead. The pieces have an irony and dark quality to them, but all connect through their “sack of bones” theme, hoping that while all of it seems irrelevant, when connected and put together, they set a unified tone.

The mood is set even before entering the gallery with a piece by Andrew Rogers outside.  Rogers' black flags (made of ballistic nylon) cast an ominous atmosphere, and this is even more pronounced when viewed in contrast to the bouncy red lanterns of Chinatown. Inside, Log Beam (Kodiak) by Eli Hansen and Oscar Tuazon is a fragmented birch tree in between processed wood and hung the length of the gallery. It evokes a nature versus man sentiment. A sculpture by Daniel Macdonald entitled, Forced to sell artwork from personal collection in order to offset living expenses portrays Dracula holding Andy Warhol’s portrait of Dracula and entering a gallery of the scale of the Wrong Gallery. A poster collage of Miami Vice by Mark Flood depicts Don Johnson, whose face is deformed and elongated, lacking a nose and forearm, smoking a cigarette. Andrew Rogers' color photograph shows an empty highway surrounded by bare trees and circle tire marks in the center creating a symbol of infinity, but lacking the car that created the marks. Dan Colen’s For Secret Snow is a portion of the graffiti and scribbled wall of the now extinct CBGB in New York. All of the work in Sack of Bones intensifies a feeling of dead objects, subdued emotions and mutiny.

-Vera Neykov

(Images courtesy of the artists and peres projects)