Mindy Rose Schwartz and David Rappeneau at Queer Thoughts

Artists: Mindy Rose Schwartz, David Rappeneau

Venue: Queer Thoughts, New York, US

Date: November 7 – December 13, 2015

Photography: images copyright and courtesy of the artists and Queer Thoughts, New York

Queer Thoughts takes great joy in announcing an exhibition of the work of Mindy Rose Schwartz and David Rappeneau. Each artist will present a complete series of works, culled from the artists’ respective archives.

Mindy Rose Schwartz will present ALIEN HEAD KEYCHAINS (2001-2002), a series of small sculptures of aliens (and alien farm animals), cast in shiny polished bronze and secured with lanyards to a variety of rings, keys, and occasional pieces of bric-a-brac. Like the conflicting aesthetic impulses that distinguish much of her work (cute but horrific, elegant whilst tacky, profound yet mundane), Schwartz’s aliens are held taut from multiple points of tension and dangle heavily with the weight of gravity. Entrapped within the craft-store bondage of Schwartz’s expert lanyards, the keychains are curious objects of aesthetic contemplation, somehow engorged with the emotional history of their imagined owners but not so fantastical as to be beyond recognition completely. Many of the objects within Schwartz’s sculptural repertoire embody these characteristics, and like keychains themselves, serve as mnemonic devices, recalling old sentiments and experiences of loss (or was it just something misplaced?). If a keychain is itself a paradox (granting access, always tethered), it has its mirror image in the alien (eternally searching, never finding home).

The work of David Rappeneau, like the artist’s own biography, is laconic. Absent from language, Rappeneau’s drawings activate the potential for a more complex communication, albeit in a more opaque form. In this exhibition Rappeneau will present a suite of eight drawings in a serial tableau [UNTITLED (2014)], an atypical format for an artist whose compositional narratives are usually contained within a single frame. But in the expanded scenography of eight views, the artist represents only one brief event, in stuttering, fractal time. Like a single word or character extended into an entire sentence [$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$], the octad of vignettes display experience as the crystalline, eternal present of life beneath a cosmos of shared signs.