SOUTHFIRST
60 N6th
Street Brooklyn, NY 11211 www.southfirst.org ph 718 599 4884
25
September – 1 November, 2009
SOUTHFIRST is proud to present JACK EARLY, the first
exhibition in New York of new installation work by JACK EARLY in seventeen
years, on view from September 25 to November 1, 2009.
While Earlys work is outsized and
bold, taking its visual cues from pre-MTV variety music television show sets,
the references he chooses speak to a longing that is intimate. Pink Floyd,
Kermit the Frog, the Gay Pride rainbow, and the Wizard of Oz movie—with
its all-pervasive desire for something out of reach, over the rainbow—all
make an appearance. On a nearly six-foot-high sculpture of a Victrola a white
album plays, lit by a spotlight. It is flanked by a free-floating Day-Glow
rainbow and a Plexiglas prism. There are songs written by Early, produced by
himself, by the members of the band Dean and Britta, and other friends, about
beautiful girls who make good in the big city, happy lovers, and clouds with
silver linings—the stuff of popular ballads. If the songs are fragile,
romantic, and DIY, they also suggest narratives central place in Pop Art, a
way in which we understand our own stories in relation to the kinds of songs and
images we hear and see around us.
If Earlys early career—the
Artwork for Teenage Boys and Artwork for Teenage Girls exhibitions of 1991,
the Red, Black, Green, Red, White and Blue show with Leo Castelli in
1992—is now nearly historical, then we are no longer part of a period of
excess for emerging art here in New York. This exhibition proposes ways to move
forward without cynicism from an exhausted past, while still retaining the
seduction and transformative possibilities of art-making itself.
Known as one of the bad-boy artists
of the late 1980s and early 1990s, JACK EARLY has exhibited widely in the
United States and Europe, most recently including exhibitions in the Franois
Pinault foundation at the Punta Della Dogana in Venice, 2009, and at E31 in
Greece. His work will be featured in the upcoming exhibition Pop Life at the
Tate Modern in London, opening September 2009. Born in North Carolina he lives
and works in NY, NY.
SOUTHFIRST is located at 60 N6th Street in Williamsburg, Brooklyn between Wythe and Kent Avenues. Gallery hours are Thursday - Sunday from 1-6 PM and by appointment. Subway: L train to Bedford Avenue. For more information, please contact Maika Pollack at 718 599 4884 or info@southfirst.org.