My first art opening – with my partner Aram Jibilian.  We will be showing the result of our recent photo/performance collaboration as part of a group show called Blind Dates.

The Blind Dates exhibition opens at Pratt Manhattan Gallery, November 19th, 2010
 with a reception on November 18th, 6-8 pm.  Free and open to the public.

144 West 14th Street, 2nd floor
New York, NY 10011
212-647-7778

 

Aram Jibilian with Aaron Mattocks as Arshile Gorky’s ghost
Gorky and the Glass House
Inkjet prints, 2010

As suggested by some of the titles of Arshile Gorky’s well-known compositions, (i.e. Garden at Sochi, Khorkom and Agony) Aram Jibilian explores the idea of the late artist having lived in an “in-between” space or in a state of exile that afforded him no home other than that which he created on his canvas. To capture Gorky’s lingering spirit, Jibilian’s photographs take us to the painter’s final home in Sherman, CT where he hung himself, and where several neighbors have spoken of encounters with his ghost (New York Times, 2003). For Blind Dates, Jibilian and his collaborator, dancer Aaron Mattocks, create a series of images loosely based on a 1948 Life magazine profile that depicted Gorky looking out of his ‘Glass House’ onto an open landscape. Gorky, who witnessed massacres and the death of his mother by starvation, had a more somber view: although he appreciated the light that entered during the day, at night he only saw darkness to be looking in. Mattocks performs the role of ghost, wearing a mask of Gorky’s face from his iconic painting The Artist and his Mother, 1926-1936. Jibilian and Mattocks use the architectural structure of the glass wall to present a view of what might be the current home of Gorky’s ghost.