“…Looking at myself from the second floor of an Italian restaurant in the Catskills…” at American Medium

Artists: Alex Chaves, Alex Felton, Sean Raspet, Carlos Reyes, Sydney Shen, Amy Yao

Exhibition title: “…Looking at myself from the second foor of an Italian restaurant in the Catskills…”

Venue: American Medium, New York, US

Date: June 19th – July 26th, 2015

Photography: images courtesy of the artists and American Medium, New York

American Medium is proud to present “…Looking at myself from the second ﬂ oor of an Italian restaurant in the Catskills…” an exhibition of work by Alex Chaves, Alex Felton, Sean Raspet, Carlos Reyes, Sydney Shen, and Amy Yao.

‘The more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates; the more perfectly will the mind digest and transmute the passions which are its material’ – T.S Eliot

“She trims her hair with pearls as she sits by the shore, she gazes in a rapture at the wind rushing through the trees.”

I am sitting in an Italian restaurant, age 9, looking out the window onto the main street of a dusty, sun drenched town in some part of the Catskills. The mountains surround and the fog rolling off of them breaks the sun into rays. I look down at the plastic-checkered tablecloth and then back up again at the window of the restaurant and then back down at the gravel road. The dust particles mix together, bond to one another, become as large as my eyes.

Delays, stops, starts, shifts.

Something reaches out across the void dug up by a memory. Meaning is lost, but the sense, the object’s feeling remains intact. The breakdown and the restoration does not diminish the intrinsic qualities.

Sunlight felt in 1995 can be sunlight felt twenty years later. Time elongates, the cord widens, stretches, tightens.

The term “hour” is used fguratively; the effect has no clearly defned duration.