Monique Meloche: We are dedicating the space to Chicago-based artist Nate Young. Young’s multi-part installation will fill the entire gallery, an exemplary piece that demonstrates the interests at the heart of his practice: structures of knowledge, language, and how we assign meaning.

moniquemeloche LES
2 Rivington Street, New York

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Nate Young
March 8 – March 11, 2018 / 11am – 6pm

Nate Young’s ongoing series of altarpiece works exemplifies the conceit at the heart of his practice: the investigation of structures of knowledge, the authority and language of systems, and the illusiveness of meaning. All handcrafted in wood, with graphite drawings and often gold leaf, Young’s altarpieces express a highly sincere spiritual drive while also questioning the medium through which that spirituality is conveyed. Like Young’s contributions to Fore at the Studio Museum in Harlem (2012), these works activate an ontological space where disparate realms of knowing collide. Born from an interest in the theological diagrams and the ecclesiastical architecture Young encountered as the son of a theologian, they tie the aesthetic language of the church to the measured graphic expression of other fields of knowledge. Semiotics, for example, in particular, the visual expression of sign and signified as conveyed by Swiss semiotician Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913), has a repeated presence in these compositions – a simple oval or circle, bisected by a single line. Young strips away any specific content, however, leaving behind a universal lexicon of primordial signs and symbols – arrows, circles, grids, and negative spaces – that strongly suggest meaning without in fact conveying it; a profound void, at once empty and full, that invites the viewer’s activation. His works contain a quiet gravitas and austerity seemingly at odds with their meticulously hand-crafted nature, prompting a post-minimalist interrogation of authority, material, and the artist’s hand.

Amy Sherald, March 2 – March 5, 2017

Additional works by:
Brendan Fernandes
Ben Murray
Nate Young

Following her much-lauded first exhibition with the gallery’s Chicago space in summer 2016, moniquemeloche is pleased to present the New York debut of Baltimore-based Amy Sherald (American, b. 1973). Inspired by artists such as Bo Bartlett, Barkley Hendricks, and Kerry James Marshall, Sherald creates arresting portraits of imagined figures based on real-life interactions, subverting and exploring notions of black identity through her unique sense of visual culture, color and line. The new works on view present a continuation of these otherworldly figures, whose charged presence is only emphasized by the current political climate. Sherald received her MFA in Painting from the Maryland Institute College of Art (2004). Her work is included in the public collections of the United States Embassy, Dakar, Senegal; the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C.; the Smithsonian Museum of African American Art and Culture, Washington, D.C.; and the National Portrait Gallery, Washington, D.C. Her recent group exhibitions include Southern Accent at the Nasher Museum of Art, Duke University, Durham, NC (2016), which travels to The Speed Museum, Louisville, KY (2017), and The Outwin 2016 at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, for which she won the grand prize in 2016, currently on view at Tacoma Art Museum, WA; traveling to Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, MO later this year.

Rooted in his experience of classical dance, Chicago- and New York-based Brendan Fernandes (Canadian, b. 1979, Kenya) creates works across a variety of media that explore unexpected clashes of culture. In his recent series of unique prints, Fernandes combines images of ballet dancers’ limbs with images of ethnographic objects culled from Western museum collections, offering a visual commentary on post-colonial notions of culture and fine art in the West. On view alongside these prints will be a selection of hand-pulled crystal coat hangers, created during his 2016 residency at Tacoma’s Museum of Glass and recently presented in his solo debut at moniquemeloche, Free Fall, January 2017. Continuing his ongoing interest in the gesture and symbolism of falling, these works speak to contemporary notions of loss and desire through their visual treatment of the Orland massacre. Fernandes received his MFA from the University of Western Ontario (2005). His work is currently on view in his solo show Lost Bodies, a traveling exhibition at the Textile Museum of Canada, Toronto, which originated at the Agnes Etherton Art Centre at Queen’s University, Ontario (2016). He is currently artist in residence and faculty in the Department of Art Theory and Practice, Northwestern University, Chicago.

Fernandes will produce a series of performances titled Clean Labor during Armory Week 2017. A collaboration with the Wythe hotel’s cleaning staff, the resulting performances will explore the similarities between the graceful and methodical movements of cleaning and those of dance, establishing a dialogue between the two, physically demanding professions. Clean Labor will also be performed at the VIP opening of the Armory Show.

Sanford Biggers
Ebony G. Patterson

March 3 – March 6, 2016

Running concurrent with Armory Arts Week 2016, moniquemeloche will present a two-person exhibition of work by Sanford Biggers and Ebony G. Patterson at 2 Rivington Street, a storefront exhibition space located just steps from the New Museum. Within Patterson’s richly ornate works on paper and Biggers’ heavily manipulated patchwork quilts, material affinities abound. The synergy of this pairing is found in their ability to employ collage as a technique to converge seemingly disparate ideas and influences into one ground.

Initially focusing on the body to impart the paradoxical relationship between Jamaica’s traditional expectations of manhood and the flamboyant aesthetics of its dancehall culture, Ebony G. Patterson’s practice has expanded to consider larger binaries in contemporary Jamaican society. New tapestries and mixed media works on paper from Dead Treez—some of which are currently on view at the Museum of Art and Design in New York—are an inquiry into the representation of violent deaths on social media. Seductive embellishments on the surface of these works belie the depth of the artist’s plight: to make visible that which is invisible. Utilizing the history of both African and Asian Diasporic culture, Sanford Biggers has developed a body of work that considers the familial and the mythological. Biggers’ ongoing investigation into the power of objects includes the use of quilts and fabrics as a platform to explore pattern and sacred geometry, non-linear notions of time and to question established histories. Drips, tears, layering and pours on the surface of the quilts combine an unexpected range of cultural and formal references. His patterned grounds of patchwork quilts are overlaid with marks and superimposed with shapes and original symbolic imagery. This cultural sampling combines with his interest in found objects, the figure, and history. The resulting works are visually rich and layered with meaning. Biggers will debut a new quilt, monumental in scale, alongside new sculptures.