Galleries TONE and HEAD CASE to be Showcased at Lesley Heller Workspace, 10/26-11/27

Gallery 1: Tom Kotik, Tone and Gallery 2: Head Case, curated by Laurel Farrin, John Dilg, Laurel Farrin, John Haskell, Ray Johnson (1927-1995), Jane Kent, Alex O'Neal, Julia Schwadron, Jonathan Seliger, James Siena, David Storey, Trevor Winkfield, Katarina Wong will be exhibited at the Lesley Heller Workspace on October 26 - November 27, 2011 with an Opening Reception on Wednesday, October 26, 6-8pm.

Gallery 1: Tom Kotik began making sound pieces in 2004 while working on his graduate sculpture thesis at Hunter College. A longtime musician and member of a rock band while at Hunter, Kotik had kept his musical endeavors separate from his artistic work until the inspiration came to him to combine the two threads of his creative life.

The intersection between sound and architecture, in Kotik's view, lies in their shared ability to define the way we experience our space and surroundings. The resulting body of work, which he refers to as "architectures of silence," explores the power of sound by its absence, as well as the subtle effects of sounds, past or future, implied or imminent.

His new work explores the architectural qualities and monolithic presence of classic rock and roll amplifiers, with their dimensions altered, to allow them to be hung on the wall like works on canvas. Though the amplifier-like forms produce no sound, they nevertheless retain their aura of rebellion and power, and evoke the blaring music that was their original purpose in life. 

Tom Kotik was born in Prague in 1969. He has a BS in Studio Art from New York University and studied at Hunter College, where he was the recipient of the Graf Travel Grant and received his MFA in 2004. He has also attended the School of Applied Arts in Prague and Glasgow School of Art in Scotland. His work has been widely exhibited in New York and abroad, including shows at Smack Mellon, Socrates Sculpture Park, and Sculpture Center in New York and Prague National Gallery in the Czech Republic.

Gallery 2: In Head Case, painter and guest curator Laurel Farrin treats portraiture as a point of departure, bringing together a group of artists who depict not just faces and heads but what goes on inside them. Playing on the exhibition title's double meaning -- head case is both slang for a crazy person and a scientific term to describe the part of a chrysalis that covers a developing insect's head -- she brings together a group of works that explore both madness and transformation.

These artists, Farrin says, "loosen the screws, unhinging head forms as containers for mischief, play and pathos. These heads make up the faces of obsession and wild restraint, nonconformist expression and myriad disorders. Through humor, madness and catharsis, we are presented with the portraits of our insides, out."

James Siena's First Old Man and Blind Nose Man examine our horror of decay and death, as well as human fears of aging and entropic forces. Katarina Wong, in Army of Me and The Beast Within, explores related themes, giving faces of horror and chaos to what may have once been cartoon animals, drawn in the usually refined medium of sumi ink. John Haskell's video, I am Not Jackson Pollock is a Cedar Bar monologue of fear, conflict and rage. David Storey's cartoonish and colorful figures have a joyful unity that makes their ambiguous hints at humanness less ominous than they might otherwise be. Julia Schwadron's Self Help series offers self-help titles for our perusal in a subtle critique of the all-surface quality that dogs the American quest for self-actualization, while Jonathan Seliger's Freud Bag gently spoofs an even shallower and more misdirected search: happiness as consumer commodity.

Alex O'Neal's Delta CityYou gives us not one or two faces but a whole crowd of them, manifesting a typically American, yet strangely endearing grandiosity in their mundane swagger and style. Trevor Winkfield's Portrait and John Dilg's HEADRESS present a quieter style of adornment, with Dilg's figure combining ceremonial adornments of the natural world in a formal portrait-landscape, and Winkfield's taking nature's glory for protective coloring. These carefully-outfitted figures reveal as much as they protect. Laurel Farrin's Looking At Painting gives us the portrait of a painter and a painting, skewed into the video world they have become. Jane Kent's dark and minimalist Double Take hints at a monotone bivalence that is equal and opposite, and finally, Ray Johnson's Not Mad Babab, a rarely seen ink drawing, is a postcard apology for madness, an epitome of wackiness.

Lesley Heller Workspace is located at 54 Orchard Street, New York, NY 10002. For more information visit http://www.lesleyheller.com/.