Buffalo, NY – Beginning February 18, 2017, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery will open four solo exhibitions featuring new work by artists Tamar Guimarães and Kasper Akhøj (Brazilian, born 1967, and Danish, born 1976), Jacob Kassay (American, born 1984), Eric Mack (American, born 1987), and Willa Nasatir (American, born 1990). These shows are organized by Senior Curator Cathleen Chaffee, and constitute either the artists’ first solo museum exhibition or first solo American museum exhibition. They will remain on view until June 18, 2017.

On Friday, February 17, a Members’ opening will take place from 5 to 7 pm, including pop-up talks with the artists and curator held throughout the galleries from 5:30 to 6:30 pm. A free public opening will follow from 7 to 9 pm. At 7:15 pm in the Auditorium, the museum will present Voices in Contemporary Art: Artists in Conversation, with Chaffee and the featured artists.

Tamar Guimarães and Kasper Akhøj: Studies for A Minor History of Trembling Matter

Studies for A Minor History of Trembling Matter presents a work in progress that focuses on the artists’ research in Palmelo, a small town in the interior of the state of Goiás, Brazil. Half of the town’s inhabitants see themselves as practicing mediums and healers—psychic conduits to the world of the spirits—while they also hold day jobs as civil servants.

The stories told by the artists are alternate and hypothetical approaches to narrative. As a way of highlighting this aspect of their practice, Guimarães and Akhøj present A Minor History of Trembling Matter in an unfinished or alternate state at the Albright-Knox. This unique installation will inform its inclusion as a single-channel film at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art later this year.

Jacob Kassay: OTNY

Jacob Kassay presents new sculptures that draw attention to the way our powerful, implicit habits shape the way we rationalize, navigate, and narrate our own movement through familiar spaces. His works on view include a subtly altered replacement for one of the museum’s handrails, a sculpture that corresponds to the volume of a domestic staircase, and a group of sculptures that replicate the interior of shelves in the kitchen, pantry, or garage of a home.

Kassay’s meditation on our rote navigation of domestic life reminds us of the extent to which we deploy, unaware, a kind of self-defense that allows us to normalize and internalize even exceptionally strange developments in order to continue operating in the world.

Eric Mack: Vogue Fabrics

Eric Mack’s paintings and sculptures interweave purchased and found materials, abstract painting, soft sculpture, wearable fashion, display devices, and expanding notions of beauty. Mack presents works from 2011 to the present that abut, but do not resolve, resplendent forms with improbable functions.

The exhibition’s title is a play on the famous fabric retailer and fashion magazine, but it is also an homage to a London nightclub of the same name, which is known for a fashion-centric dance subculture where image and identity are created through performance. If Vogue Fabrics demonstrates that the current and unfashionable, heavy and diaphanous, luxurious and unseemly may occupy the same field, it also proposes that such private negotiations become a public conversation.

Willa Nasatir

Willa Nasatir presents evocative new photographs that capture her unique approach to staging, photographing, and rephotographing elaborate sculptural landscapes of her own creation. To make these works, she first assembles objects both common and unusual: copper tubing, a pair of broken eyeglasses, a motorcycle helmet, a child’s chair, a rubber snake. In the space between her constructions and camera she then props mirrors, bends Mylar, and deploys scrims of extruded Plexiglas.

Each individual photograph is sourced from a memory or a narrative, whether something the artist experienced or a powerful scene in an artwork or a film. However, they do not tell stories. Rather, she unmoors her subjects from their origins. The resulting photographs call on the viewer to create their own storylines.

These exhibitions were made possible through the generosity of the Fundación Jumex Arte Contemporáneo. Additional equipment and technical support for Tamar Guimarães and Kasper Akhøj: Studies for A Minor History of Trembling Matter was provided by Advantage TI.

Close collaborations with artists have always been central to the Albright-Knox’s mission. The museum’s history of working with artists relatively early in their careers includes notable installations of new work by Marisol in 1963, Bruce Nauman in 1975, Paul Sharits in 1976, and Steina and Woody Vasulka in 1978. More recently, the museum has organized the first solo museum exhibitions in the United States of artists such as Joan Linder and Torey Thornton.

###