Hidden Hour
“Collecting can come very close to what is involved in the making of art. The assemblage of disparate elements into a totality evokes the satisfying metaphors of wholeness and unity, and the containment or display of what is valuable involves the very same questions of form and function that any artist must ask.”
—William Davies King, Collections of Nothing
Tick-tock, tick-tock… Losing all sense of time, lost in the minutiae, sorting and classifying, discovering new details, our eyes become blurry as another hour passes. One could call this a compulsion, but we instead call it a collection. It manifests in a rumpled baggie full of deeply creased magazine clippings, or a drawer overflowing with 1981 pennies, or an accumulation of images tucked inconspicuously into a desktop folder. Sometimes, it is a thing made. Sometimes, it is a thing found. Sometimes, it is nothing more than a set of memories replayed again and again in the mind, so as not to forget. A collection is an indulgence but it is also a necessity.
While we now take for granted the centrality of collecting as a human behavior, conversations about “collecting” in the gallery context were once most closely associated with connoisseurship and relegated to the affluent. Now, living in a world of digital connectedness, and the endless sub-cultures and information streams it enables, society at-large is prepared to approach cultural production through collection-centric understanding of the world. High and low culture can now blend in unexpected ways, and the artists of Hidden Hour demonstrate the multitude of ways the collector-mindset can both inform the production of artwork, and how to engage with an audience adept as collectors.
This exhibition features seven artists whose work invokes various notions of “collecting.” Adam Milner scours the world around him for discarded or obscure objects to define aspects of identity and relationships. Craig Drennen, who, for the past decade, created artworks based on characters from the critically panned 1984 film Supergirl and Shakespeare’s obscure play Timon of Athens, has acquired a roster of players that can be called upon for any performance. Pam Lins, who is known for interdisciplinary work that addresses how history can be synthesized to convey emotion, presents a collection of crying eyes she has been making weekly since Donald Trump has taken office. Both Rubens Ghenov and Nicole Cherubini focus on the past as a vehicle to explore how we determine value in both everyday objects and those with cultural significance. The drawings of Amy Pleasant seek to document the uniqueness, as well as the commonality, found within the human form. Lastly, the motifs found within Shai Yehezkelli’s paintings—figures, plants, pots— help solidify our desire for the domestic to preserve elements of our humanity.
About the Artists
Nicole Cherubini received her BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design (Providence, RI), and MFA from New York University (New York, NY). Her work has been featured in solo exhibitions at institutions including the Institute of Contemporary Art (Philadelphia, PA), the Jersey City Museum (Jersey City, NJ), the Nassau County Museum of Art (Roslyn Harbor, NY), the Pérez Art Museum Miami (Miami, FL), the Santa Monica Museum of Art (Los Angeles, CA), and (forthcoming) University Art Museum (Albany, NY). She has participated in numerous group exhibitions at institutions including the Cranbrook Art Museum (Bloomfield Hills, MI), the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (Boston, MA), the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art (Kansas City, MO), MoMA PS1 (Long Island City, NY), Museo de Arte Raúl Anguiano (Guadalajara, México), the Museum of Fine Arts (Boston, MA), the Rhode Island School of Design Museum (Providence, RI), the Rose Art Museum (Waltham, MA), Sculpture Center (Long Island City, NY), the Studio Museum in Harlem (New York, NY), the Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery (Saratoga, NY), the Walker Art Center (Minneapolis, MN), and Permanenten: The West Norway Museum of Decorative Art (Bergen, Norway). Her work is held in numerous private and public collections, such as the Cranbrook Art Museum (Bloomfield Hills, MI), the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Cambridge, MA), the Museum of Fine Arts (Boston, MA), the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (Boston, MA), the Museum of Arts and Design (New York, NY), the Pérez Art Museum Miami (Miami, FL), the Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery (Saratoga, NY), the Progressive Collection (Mayfield Village, OH), and the Tishman Speyer Collection (New York, NY). She will be the artist in residence at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum (Boston, MA) fall 2018. Cherubini lives and works in Hudson, NY.
Craig Drennen is an artist based in Atlanta, GA and a 2018 Guggenheim Fellow. His recent solo exhibition “BANDIT” at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Georgia included a catalog with essay by Diana Nawi. His work has been reviewed in Artforum, Art in America, and The New York Times. He has been a resident artist at Yaddo, MacDowell Colony, and the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture. He teaches at Georgia State University, served as dean of the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture for four years, and writes for Art Pulse magazine. Since 2008 he has organized his studio practice around Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens.
Rubens Ghenov was born in São Paulo, Brazil and immigrated to the US in 1989. He holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Tyler School of Art (1999) and his Master of Fine Arts from Rhode Island School of Design (2010). Ghenov has shown nationally in both solo and group exhibitions at Morgan Lehman (NY), Geoffrey Young Gallery (MA), Whitespace Gallery, (GA), Hoffman LaChance (MO), Vanderbilt University Fine Arts Gallery (TN), TSA Brooklyn (NYC), Crosstown Arts (TN), Woodmere Art Museum (PA), the Philadelphia Museum of Art (PA) amongst others. In 2013, he co-curated with Dona Nelson the 72nd Annual Juried Exhibition at the Woodmere Art Museum. He has been featured in Art in America, Hyperallergic, The Tennessean, Bomb Magazine, Village Voice, ARTSATL, Title Magazine and the Philadelphia Inquirer. Ghenov was the recipient of the Affiliated Fellowship at the American Academy in Rome in 2019. He is currently an Assistant Professor of Painting and Drawing at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.
Pam Lins (b. Chicago, IL) earned an MFA from Hunter College, New York, NY. The artist has been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions over the past twenty years, at venues including the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT; Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, Detroit, MI; White Columns, New York, NY; the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University, Princeton, NJ; The Tang Museum, Saratoga Springs, NY; The Suburban, Chicago, IL; the Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY; The Anderson Gallery at Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, VA; CCS Bard Galleries, Annadale-on-Hudson, NY; Artists Space, New York, NY; and the Socrates Sculpture Park, Queens, NY. Additionally, the artist was included in the 2014 Whitney Biennial.
Lins is the recipient of multiple awards and fellowships, including The Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award, The Anonymous Was A Woman Award, The Brown University Howard Foundation Fellowship, and The John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship Award. In 2013-2014, she held the David and Roberta Logie Fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. Lins has held teaching positions at The Cooper Union, The Milton Avery MFA Program at Bard College, and Princeton University and her work is in the permanent collection of the Tang Museum, Saratoga Springs, NY. Lins maintains a studio in Brooklyn, NY.
Adam Milner draws upon personal exchanges with people, things and institutions, to examine systems of intimacy, value and power. Approaching materials and spaces that are often off limits, his works reveal boundaries and involve a process of negotiation and exchange; he has performed aboard a cruise ship hosted by the app Grindr, collaborated with material engineers at NASA to use rare lunar regolith simulant, intervened in the archives of Andy Warhol, and routinely drawn his boyfriend’s blood.
He has exhibited at The Warhol, Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, Aspen Art Museum, Casa Maauad, Galería Mascota, Flux Factory, Florian Christopher Zurich, and David B. Smith Gallery. Milner received an MFA from Carnegie Mellon University (2017), is a recent participant of the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2018), and is currently a fellow with Black Cube Nomadic Museum. Milner lives and works in Brooklyn.ellow with Black Cube Nomadic Museum. Milner lives and works in Brooklyn.
Amy Pleasant received a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (1994) and an MFA from the Tyler School of Art (1999).
She has held solo exhibitions at Geary Contemporary, NYC; Jeff Bailey Gallery, Hudson/NYC; whitespace gallery, Atlanta, GA; Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art, IN; Birmingham Museum of Art, AL; Atlanta Contemporary, GA; among others. Her work has been included in numerous two-person and group exhibitions at venues such as Tif Sigfrids, Athens, Georgia, the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, AL; Adams and Ollman, Portland, OR; Frist Center for the Visual Arts, Nashville, TN; Cuevas Tilleard Projects, New York, NY; Knoxville Museum of Art, TN; Zuckerman Museum of Art, Kennesaw, GA; Lamar Dodd School of Art, Athens, GA; Hunter Museum of American Art, Chattanooga, TN; and Weatherspoon Museum of Art, Greensboro, NC.
Pleasant is a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellow (2018) and received the South Arts Prize for the State of Alabama (2018). Other awards include a Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Award (2015), the Mary Hambidge Distinguished Artist Award (2015), and Individual Art Fellowships from the Cultural Alliance of Birmingham (2008) and the Alabama State Council on the Arts (2019/2003).
Her work has been reviewed in many publications including Art in America, Art Papers, Artforum, The Brooklyn Rail and Sculpture.
Shai Yehezkelli was born in Israel, and earned his BFA Degree with Highest Honor (”Summa Cum Laude”) from Bezalel Academy of Art and Design Jerusalem (2006), and his MFA from the Bezalel Academy, Tel Aviv (2010). He was awarded The Rappaport award for a young artist (2015), the “Bank Leumi Prize for Outstanding Academic Achievements” and the “Arieli” prize in 2006 and received a grant from The Israeli lottery Culture-Council in 2014. Yehezkelli has exhibited solo shows and has been in group shows in US, UK, Germany and in Israel.
