Good Old New Place

Yevgenia Baras, Julia Bland, Matias Cuevas, Joseph Montgomery

November 18 - December 18, 2016

GOOD OLD NEW PLACE

Yevgenia Baras, Julia Bland, Matias Cuevas, Joseph Montgomery

November 18 - December 18, 2016

CUEVAS TILLEARD is pleased to present Good Old New Place, a group exhibition featuring work by Yevgeniya Baras, Julia Bland, Matias Cuevas, and Joseph Montgomery, on view at the gallery from November 18 – December 18, 2016.

Good Old New Place brings together the work of four New York City-based artists to approach the idea of personal utopias existing in parallel with the idea of the architecture of an image: how artists imagine, construct, and develop idiosyncratic spaces/artworks through form, materiality, and time.

English Renaissance humanist Thomas More coined the term ‘utopia’ circa 1516, within the title of one of his books. In the work of fiction and political philosophy, More lays out a narrative that describes an imaginary ideal society, free of poverty and suffering, where the niceties of society reign – standards of freedom, equality, and a universal pacifist attitude.

The 20th Century Modernists championed the same desire to create a better world in a historically unique utopian fashion. Artists, Writers, Musicians, Architects, and Scientists saw technology as a way to create greater equality and achieve social improvement. The idea of progress, and the machine itself, became symbols of that aspiration - novelty was the norm - and the feeling that art and design could transform society reigned for almost half a century.

Today, that shared desired for a better world remains. The terms of production and circulation have radically changed, yet artists are still at it, imagining and re-thinking the world. Transformative impulses are no longer solely focused on the direct and pragmatic. The personal and poetic voices are growing.

Good Old New Place focuses on these - on the latent transformative power that beats at the core of Baras, Bland, Cuevas, and Montgomery's daily performance of art-making, and on its subsequent sublimation into the art object. All four artists bring to life artworks invested with a vast accumulation of energy and a stockpile of affect.

Pushing abstraction, materiality, and form, the artists work to combine disparate elements into a whole. Banal objects and materials; an architectural approach to composition; and a wide range of patterns and textures collapse into one another, letting the personal emerge and develop into very idiosyncratic, if not ideal, pictorial spaces. Baras, Bland, Cuevas, and Montgomery’s work is constructed through and from repetitive emotional and material layering processes, allowing their work’s value to ripen over time.

We often imagine the innovations of utopian concepts to be radical and revolutionary. Good Old New Place puts forward a more modest and immediate vision. Grounded in the personal and the poetic, we humbly aim to be transformative and inspirational one layer at a time.

There will be an opening reception for the artists on Friday, November 18th from 6 – 9pm