In Spite of Their Defeat

IN SPITE OF THEIR DEFEAT

HEIMIR BJÖRGÚLFSSON | JULIANA PACIULLI | WILLIAM RANSOM | AMIR ZAKI

June 9 - July 17, 2012
Opening Reception: Saturday, June 9, 2012, 6-9pm 

In the gallery's inaugural group exhibition, In Spite of Their Defeat, artists exhibit works that explore the dual existance of victory and defeat. The former eventually dissolves away with time; whereas, the latter can be the first stepping stone laid on a path to even higher, newly-realized potentials. William Morris observed the kinship between the two states when he said:

Men fight and lose the battle, and the thing that they fought for comes about in spite of their defeat, and then it turns out not to be what they meant, and other men have to fight for what they meant under another name.

In his collages, Heimir Björgúlfsson explores mankind's inability to formalize nature, and nature's inability to remain unchanged by man. By converging the elements of disparate locations, Björgúlfsson interrupts the language of the landscape, questioning the oppositional ideals of man-made and natural organization.

Juliana Paciulli's video work Go Ask Alice (2011) is the second video/photo work in a pair of pieces about the mainstreaming of counter-culture, contextual language, and sound. Drawing its title (and some of the video's audio track) from the early 1970's film and book about a fictional teenage girl's struggles with LSD, Paciulli adds video that frames the relationship between need, desire, suffering, and survival.

William Ransom's sculptural works display the precarious state of triumph. Though reminding the viewer that there are insuperable outside forces, Ransom engages those forces in creating his sculpture. Forms poetically emerge as strips of wood are stacked, clamped, or looped so that the material itself becomes the source of both stability and fragility.

Amir Zaki's photographs provide an instant recall. As the viewer seeks more anchors to justify the familiarity, Zaki's subtle touches soon reveal that one has been drawn into truly unfamiliar grounds. By bringing into question the nature of the subject, the artist introduces a situation where safety and stability are balanced by equal measures of uncertainty and inaccessibility.

For more information please contact the gallery at + 1 323 333 6610 or info@greene-exhibitions.com