NEWS + UPCOMING EVENTS

Reece Terris
Untitled (Art Miami), 2007
Wall panels, Door skin, Paint
38 x 14 feet


Invited to participate in this year’s Art Miami fair, artist Reece Terris is representing Jennifer Kostuik gallery from Vancouver with an installation work constructed in the days prior to the new fair’s opening. Terris’ project involves the wall panels (4’ x 12’ or 2’ x 12’) used for multiple art fairs to facilitate the easy assembly/disassembly of exhibitor booths. The booth granted to the Kostuik gallery is located in the Northwest corner of the first tent, an area that was not leveled properly, leaving many of the booths here sitting slightly askew. Terris has amplified this unfavourable condition by reconstructing the 23- panel booth (38’ x 14’) to highlight the angled walls and shifting planes. One wall tilts back while another pitches forward and others lean out. The monumental storage closet at the end of the allocated space juts out with a startling audacity that puts the stability of the entire tent structure into question. The project can be seen from a number of positions throughout the tent and it this tension between construction and constructed viewpoint in which the success of Terris’s installation depends.

Perhaps the most telling view can be had from behind the walls where one can see the vinyl remains of exhibitors past. There is a sublime precariousness at work here that oscillates between exhibition design, how to make your booth stand out among the numerous galleries included, and the real conditions of the art fair. The work is not without humour as through Terris’ formalized reconstruction and slight addition, the Kostuik space is both the best and the worst exhibitor booth in the tent. What remains for the fair visitor is a subtle five-day negotiation between the artist and his dealer made manifest through the gallery artworks placement and display within the customized booth. More than a simple deconstruction contained within the parameters of the fair however, Terris’ project also hints at the total transformation of the fair’s exceedingly temporary architecture. Here, the aesthetic and the social have been elegantly woven together, using the very materials typically utilized for the purposes of separation.

While the photographs that make up Platform's exhibition "In Between Days" are by two artists with very different experiences and perspectives, the "landscapes" observed by these artists go far in telling us about what happens around us when we aren't necessarily looking—in the in between moments.

Kevin O'Connell has been exhibiting his photographic images since the early 1990s. The work in "In Between Days" is taken from a body of photographs called "Nocturn," made in the spring of 2007 while he was undergoing steroid treatments to counter complications from a bone marrow transplant. Insomnia, a side effect of the treatment, challenged Kevin to deal with the long, unoccupied hours of sleepless nights, pushing him out into the night into his sleeping yard to photograph, in ambient light, the mysteries that occur in between the daylight hours.

Kevin's work is included in the collections of the Museum of FIne Arts, Houston, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Denver Art Museum, and the Biblioteque Nationale de France, Paris, as well as numerous corporate collections. He lives in Denver and this is his first exhibition in Seattle.
Adam Satushek pays close attention to the ways that human beings influence their surroundings through the traces that are left behind and the impact on the landscape from behaviors, movements, and alterations. His work captures the odd and unintended intersections of common, forgotten objects with the natural environment; an environment which then must bear the mark of that uninvited partnership and struggle mightily to maintain its dignity.

Adam graduated from the University of Washington with a BFA in Photography in 2006 and has exhibited at Rake Gallery in Portland and SOIL Gallery in Seattle. He lives in Seattle and will have a solo show in July of 2008 at Gallery 4Culture in Seattle.

www.platformgallery.com