JOEY KOTTING
Welcome to Cowhead
May 6 through June 9, 2000
Fredericks Freiser Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of newwork by Joey Kotting. The artist has had solo exhibitions at White Columns, New York, Galerie Yvon Lambert, Paris, as well as a two person exhibition at PaceWildenstein/McGill. Most recently he was seen in the group exhibition “Achieving Failure: Gym Culture 2000” at Thread Waxing Space.
Welcome to Cowhead is an installation of film and painting. The eight-minute film consists of seven films shot individually in Super 8, digital video, and still photography, edited to a single soundtrack, and shown concurrently in a split-screen format on a single screen. The soundtrack was created for Welcome to Cowhead by Toby McMillan and is based loosely on the classic Windmills of your Mind by Michel Legrand.
Cowhead is a town in the northern region of Newfoundland, a place where for half the year the sun never sets. The artist traveled there to make a series of paintings, which are seen being made during each of the seven installments of the film. His method of painting is actually photographic in nature. He positions himself or his wife between the sun and a canvas covered with a mixture of potassium bichromate, gum arabic, and pigment. The finished canvas records the shape or movement of body as burned in by the sun and is colored in one of the seven colors of the spectrum.
Joey Kotting’s work is layered with contradictions. His paintings are made with a photo process, while the film is shot and edited in an expressionistic, almost painterly style. In turn, the making of the film is much more active than the making of the paintings. The filmic imagery is often quiet--either landscape or the minute to minute banalities of life. Yet the film itself is very fast paced, cut very rapidly with almost a fleeting quality that is contradicted in the paintings which seem to encapsulate memory.
Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 11am to 6pm. For further information and/or photographs please contact the gallery by telephone at (212) 633-6555 or fax at (212) 367-9502.