May 1 – June 30, 2012

Due to the process-based nature of the Session program, Rose Marcus & Andy Meerow: Café underwent constant modifications; the features of this page provided accruing information on the Session’s developments and will continue to track the project’s progression beyond Recess’s walls.

Events

About Rose Marcus & Andy Meerow: Café

On May 1, 2012 Rose Marcus and Andy Meerow will begin work on Café, as part of Recess’s signature program, Session. Session invites artists to use its public space as studio, exhibition venue and grounds for experimentation. For Café, Marcus and Meerow will work in ways that address specific economic conditions that inform their collaboration and autonomous creative practices in New York City.

Structural collapse can be very beautiful. Marcus has been photographing abandoned storefronts in midtown Manhattan for years. During the first stages of Café, the artists will adhere these photographs to standard construction panels; objects doubling as furniture and décor become the exhibition. These estheticized signs of failure and opportunity, act as a physical and theoretical site for an existing body of paintings by Meerow. They are the foundational gesture into which both artists will fold their subsequent work throughout Session.

What is self-portraiture in the expanded-field? A charcoal drawing is one example, but this research will probe more direct and physical forms of self-positioning. The artists will review the supposition that they are working just by correctly moving their bodies around and assess their role as part of a larger body of people helping each other make sense. Together, the creative populace projects bolstered self-images into the void, or rather, the bounty.

The final character in this triangle will be New York City itself. In a city built for and by the driven, coffee becomes both the medium and metaphor for collective ambition. Coffee will also be the “wet media” these two non-painters start with: there will be brown wall treatments and flowing art. The pair will be working with issues of class and classiness, with roles and goals that feel at times feel too thin, but then…

 

About the Artists

Rose Marcus works without a studio and is obtaining an MA in Art History. She has exhibited at Atlanta Center for Contemporary Art, La Mama Galeria, Ramiken Crucible, Cave-in Puerto Rico, IMO Projects Copenhagen. She has lectured at Columbia and Art in General, organized independent presentations at NADA Miami and founded the Dependent art fair.

Andy Meerow completed his MFA at VCU and exhibited work at Cave-In Puerto Rico, Real Fine Arts, Bodega, Rivington Arms, Gavin Brown’s Passerby, and By and By, Brooklyn. His practice extends from painting into writing and music. The two recently made the shows “Hand is a Gifft” at Reference in Richmond, Virginia and “Chairs” at NADA in Hudson.