Interim in Three Rounds
DEC1 DEC17 JAN13
December 1, 2009 – January 30, 2010
Round 2 Opens December 17, 2009
Curated by Jason Murison

Round 1: Joyce Pensato, Heimo Zobernig / Dec 1 - 12
Round 2: Keith Edmier, Matt Keegan, John Miller, Seth Price / Dec 17 – Jan 13
Round 3: Matthew Brannon, Anne Eastman, Jorge Pardo, Adam Putnam / Jan 15 – 30

Interim in Three Rounds is composed of three different exhibitions under one continual theme. Every two viewing weeks throughout the two-month time period (set aside time for a 10-day holiday break), the gallery will be reconfigured as simple guides to understanding the exhibition space itself. Taking positions of time, space, and light each round will examine the use of temporality either in an artwork's function or through its concept.

Lining the gallery's east wall are Seth Price paintings depicting calendar pages from 2003 and 2004. The significance of the date used in the artwork is precisely hinged upon its insignificance: as they recede into the recent past they have not quite been recorded as history or nostalgized just yet. The year, for the moment, remains frozen. Each painting also depicts an image of either an analog technology or painting once created for a political movement from a forgotten past. These images remain unrecognizable simply due to sea changes in our culture. Price plays upon the popular sentiment of calendar art and the use of celebrated "timeless" images. Yet for Price it is the image that has been stripped of its cultural context that makes these images timeless. Each calendar page is coupled and intersected with John Miller's Untitled (July 22nd, 2001) photographs. The photographs are from an ongoing series in which Miller documents the middle of the day, precisely the time between noon and two, a time often regarded as the worst for photographic lighting. He photographs the very happenings that will slip from the documented world. In the case of this exhibition, Miller photographs Berlin's Love Parade yet it is the time period that is being documented, equalizing both the festive and the banal. In both Miller's photographs and Price's calendar paintings time constrains and eliminates meaning stripping the images depicted bare.
. The significance of the date used in the artwork is precisely hinged upon its insignificance: it has not become quite history or nostalgized just yet. That year for the moment remains frozen in the recent past. Each painting also depicts an image of either an analog technology or painting once created for a political movement from a forgotten past. These images remain unrecognizable simply due to sea changes in our culture. Price plays upon the popular sentiment of calendar art and the use of celebrated "timeless" images. Yet for Price it is the image that has been stripped of its cultural context that makes these images timeless. Each calendar page is coupled with John Miller's Untitled (July 22nd, 2001) photographs. The photographs are from an ongoing series in which Miller documents the middle of the day, precisely the time between noon and two, a time often regarded as the worst for photographic lighting. He photographs the very happenings that will slip from the documented world. In the case of this exhibition, Miller photographs Berlin's Love Parade yet it is the time period that is being documented, equalizing both the festive and the banal. In both Miller's photographs and Price's calendar paintings time constrains and eliminates meaning stripping the images depicted bare.

In contrast, Keith Edmier's cast plastic boombox, Frank Veteran, contextualizes itself through the use of time. Emanating from the sculpture's speakers is the personal narrative of Frank Veteran, one of Roosevelt Hospital's doctors in residence on December 8, 1980. The steaming narrative describes witnessing the arrival of John Lennon's body after he was murdered. The boombox is the very instrument that Edmier first heard the news of Lennon's death. In the artwork, Edmier links his personal history to the history of the doctor and Lennon's. The boombox (which is now as antiquated as the technologies that Price depicts in his calendars) is energized by nostalgia and becomes a monument of the event.

Finally, Matt Keegan's March 17, 2009 is punctuated by its temporal state. At the center of the photograph is a newspaper daily held open by a figure reading. Keegan uses the newspaper in much the same way a kidnapper would use it in a ransom note. In a sense, the hostage is the newspaper itself. The photograph is of the March 17, 2009 New York Times on which its cover story reported on the last print version of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Keegan plays upon the paradox of The Times reporting on the demise of another rival newspaper, this when throughout the United States print media hinges on the verge of total collapse. The paper is an epitaph, but only as temporal as today's news always is: a point of intrigue that evaporates quickly in to the forgotten past.

For further information, please contact the gallery at info@petzel.com, or call (212) 680-9467.