Downbeat: Denniston Hill at Marian Goodman Gallery | 13 July – 18 August 2023

Marian Goodman Gallery is pleased to announce #downbeat, an exhibition about Denniston Hill, the artist residency founded by artists Julie Mehretu and Paul Pfeiffer and architect Lawrence Chua.
Downbeat features alumni and collaborators of Denniston Hill’s residency program, including #rosabarba, #pelenakekebrown, Renee Gladman, #autumnknight, #zoeleonard, #josephliatela, #emmamcnally, #maiacruzpalileo, #sojournertruthparsons, #carlosreyes, and #apichatpongweerasethakul.

The exhibition takes its title from Denniston Hill’s concept of the “downbeat”: a rhythmic kind of time stretched out to make space for rest, reflection, research, and rejuvenation—essential components of the creative process. Artists exist under a constant pressure to produce. Artist studios are expected to operate like factories, many without the benefit of staff or distribution systems.

The Denniston Hill “downbeat” is a counterbalance to this energy. It recognizes artists as whole human beings and nourishes all aspects of artistic production. #downbeat brings together artworks that resonate with this particular temporality and demands for artist care by addressing alternative modes of being and perception, slowing down the perceived passage of time to intensify experience. Three large-scale installations by #autumnknight, #josephliatela, and #carlosreyes offer a physical experience of the pendulum that swings between rest, pleasure, and labor. Liatela’s Heaven’s Gate (2021) holds us in a liminal emotional state. While standing inside the work’s immersive room of blissful sounds and scents, we see through its PVC “walls” to another, harsher reality: the world we just left.

Knight’s Lottery Tickets (2022) tasks viewers with scratching the surface of a series of drawings to reveal the compositions hidden underneath. In a reversal of roles, a normally passive audience suddenly takes on the “work” of mark making so that the artist might be allowed to rest.
Reyes’ 7129619 (1) (2018) drapes an awning from a defunct men’s bath house across the floor. No longer a shelter from the sun or an enticement for entry, the awning becomes a timekeeper. It simultaneously transports our fantasies to the glory days of this bath house, while its wornness
reminds us that we are all proceeding forward towards our own eventual mortality.

The agency of being on one’s own time is an essential aspect of the #downbeat. Pelenakeke Brown’s Crossings (2018) series simultaneously untethers and reunites language into new cosmologic patterns to explore “crip time”: a term the artist uses to describe a pace liberated from a Capitalist, able-bodied clock. Renee Gladman’s Slowly We Have the Feeling: Scores (2019 - 2022) presents words and equations as vibrational partners dancing with one another on paper. By musically accentuating the rhythmic components of drawing and writing, Gladman’s scores generate a space/time relationship that relies on interpretation and sensation. Emma McNally’s Sisters (2022) series evokes the always emerging time of quantum physics. McNally, like Gladman, is particularly interested in the vibrational qualities that bond elements together.

Her artist statement quotes Karen Barad’s theories on the entangled nature of existence and infers a familial relationship between space and time. Rosa Barba’s Color Studies (2013) is a filmic meditation on color, time, and perception. In it, two 16mm projectors face each other and share a single screen between them anchored by a music stand. Their overlapping images thus become a musical score, as a chromatic rhythm emerges from the combination of colors like notation sheets.
Through works by #zoeleonard, #maiacruzpalileo, #sojournertruthparsons, #carlosreyes, and #apichatpongweerasethakul, we understand how the #downbeat is a rhythm more closely aligned with the ebbs and flows of the natural environment. The intentional slowing of time allows a stripping
back of the bureaucratic layers that keep us separated from our most organic selves. Parsons’ paintings are coded compositions that suggest multiple modes of beingness in the world. Leonard’s four gelatin silver prints of birds flying above rooftops in Brooklyn propose a listening to the environment that is “relaxed, but not passive.” More actively, Palileo’s paintings and sculpture intentionally scramble the historical “accuracy” of the relationship between time, #people, and nature in order to liberate visual artifacts from the “exploitative gaze of the ethnographic image.” Reyes’ Night Club (2016), is a series of hand-blown glass sculptures rhythmically encapsulating the artist’s breathing patterns. In Weerasethakul’s short film, Vapour (2015), a mysterious cloud—the breath of a landscape—completely engulfs a mountain village in Northern Thailand for one day.

The resulting melee is a metaphor for the dangerous ways that inharmonious ecosystems can swallow each other. The exhibition welcomes viewers into a gathering space akin to Denniston Hill’s campus, where a multi-voiced chorus of artists is held together by an atmospheric ethos of “creleizure,” as Hélio Oiticica termed “creative leisure time.” By syncopating socially conditioned notions of time with the more fluid and individualized (or entangled) pace required by creativity, the works presented share notions of rest and deceleration as essential components of artmaking.