UPCOMING AT YASHAR GALLERY

OPENING FRIDAY AUGUST 23 6-9PM

The Mark of Its Tooth
Yashar Gallery
August 23 – September 11, 2019

Opening Reception Friday, August 23 from 6 – 9pm
Featuring: Kelly Olshan (@kellyolshanfineart), Andrew Schwartz (@schwartzstudios), Michael McHale (@michaelmchaledesigns)
Curated by: Erin Gleason

“Real duration is that duration which gnaws on things, and leaves on them the mark of its tooth.” – Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, 1911

The Mark of Its Tooth brings together two artists and a lighting designer whose work reveals Bergson’s premise that everything is in time, everything changes inwardly, and that the same concrete reality never repeats. Curated by Erin Gleason, this exhibition at Yashar Gallery will be on view August 23–September 11, 2019, with an opening reception on Friday, August 23 from 6–9 pm. Yashar Gallery is located at 276 Greenpoint Avenue, Brooklyn NY 11222.
Artists Kelly Olshan and Andrew Schwartz and lighting designer Michael McHale all examine our relationship with space, time, and materiality through experimental processes and playful juxtapositions that reveal the marks of time’s tooth. Through their processes, each artist honors the internal time of the object while revealing the uniqueness of its moment in the present in order to convey meaning: Olshan uses “artistic waste” and iterative references in her examinations of architectural space, Schwartz uses his body and repurposed objects including bedsheets and pillowcases to create landscapes of color and light, and McHale uses uncanny objects in a utilitarian design to playfully transport the viewer to another time and space—in this instance a chandelier sparks visions of dancing the hustle in a midnight’s summer garden.  
Each artwork is a play between lived time (what Bergson calls duration), memory, and repetition. The artists embrace the fluidity of internal time and object-ness, astutely using abstraction as an inherent part of the process of repetition in order to convey meaning. “Repetition,” Bergson declares, “is only possible in the abstract. [Solely] preoccupied in welding the same to the same, intellect turns away from the vision of time. It dislikes what is fluid, and solidifies everything it touches.” He continues, “We do not think real time. But we live it, because life transcends intellect.” Through their works, these artists turn us toward the vision of time, offering us an opportunity to un-weld ourselves from depending on the intellectual tricks of categorizing the world according to an atemporal sameness and to instead live more playfully and fluidly, leaving our own unique marks.
Erin Gleason