For the word “mod,” like all homonyms, everything is a situation. It’s a slippery term with many meanings that depend on context, which could be early twentieth-century philosophical and aesthetic iconoclasm, postwar architecture, 1960s Carnaby Street, or something else altogether. For Two Coats of Paint, a favorite definition comes from contemporary gaming: mods are created when a player takes the basic code or structure of a game and changes the plot. In one way or another, the five artists selected for this exhibition could all be considered “modders,” whether exploring ideas about Modernism, working modularly, hacking the outcome, or serving as moderators who steer conversations. Artists include Sharon Butler, Peter Dudek, Steve Hicks, Sheila Pepe, and Adam Simon. The expanded version of the exhibition will also include work by installation artist Lisa Hoke.
Read Carol Diamond’s review of “MOD” at Art Spiel https://artspiel.org/mod-at-platform-project-space/
April 22 to May 21, 2022 / Opening: April 22
Platform Project Space, 20 Jay Street #319, Brooklyn, NY 11201
Director: artist Elizabeth Hazan
Platform Project Space: https://www.platformprojectspace.com/current-show
Platform on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/platformprojectspace/
Sharon Butler is a painter and publisher of the art blogazine Two Coats of Paint. Her geometric abstractions, which explore the tension between digital and handmade, and are based on drawings that she makes in a phone app.
Peter Dudek is a sculptor who creates environments and large sculptural arrangements that combine found pieces of furniture and other items with handcrafted objects. Ideas about modularity and Modernism inform his work. Peter is the co-director of Bascom Lodge on Mount Greylock in Massachusetts, an instructor at Hunter College and the School of Visual Arts, and an independent curator.
Steve Hicks‘ paintings are an evolving abstract narrative informed by the spirit of de Kooning, Gorky, and other Modernists. In Two Coats of Paint artist Carol Diamond wrote that in Hicks? paintings ?you feel an intuitively familiar syntax at play: tangled arcing lines, saturated color planes, transparencies, curves, and zigzags.? His current work explores overlapping rectangles, line, and illusions of space and light
Sheila Pepe is best known for crocheting large-scale, ephemeral installations and sculpture using domestic and industrial materials. “I make simultaneous bodies of work,” she says. “Each one starts as one breaks off from another, or conjoin where bodies meet. I work ?round the studio ? as in a kitchen ? tending each pot, cutting board and dish. All bodies of work remain open until the end of me.”
Adam Simon‘s recent paintings combine corporate logotypes, stock photography, and tropes of Modernist design. He lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Thomas Micchelli wrote in Hyperallergic that “you can look at Simon’s work as Neo-Pop or Neo-Neo-Geo, but that would be missing a key aspect of the work, which is frankness. Simon is working with what he sees right in front of him, without irony or condescension.”
Lisa Hoke’s installations feature the bright colors of packaging materials shaped into playful curvilinear forms, but they are hardly pollyannaish or utopian. “It is rather a serious, if also playful, Woolfean depiction of the intellectual and psychological density of everyday life,” Jonathan Stevenson wrote in a 2021 post. “In the current socio-political context, it might stand as well as a paean to the comparatively benign norms of the more stable, less dreadful, and still hectic world that existed only a decade ago but now seems wistfully out of reach.”
Two Coats of Paint is an NYC-based art project that includes an award-winning art blogazine, artists residency, social media services, online conversations, catalogue essays for painters, and other special initiatives. In 2022, Two Coats of Paint started a new online project, The Lives of Artists, to publish artists’ obituaries and commemorate artists who have died.
