Kenji Fujita, Zak Kitnick, Sam Pulitzer
Kenji Fujita, Zak Kitnick, Sam Pulitzer : Live at The Acropolis
June 18 - August 13, 2011
The Company is pleased to present Kenji Fujita, Zak Kitnick, Sam Pulitzer: Live at the Acropolis, an exhibition that brings together three artists working with a shared interest in architectural space, alteration and ornamentation, and a matter-of-fact treatment of materials. Using found and purchased materials, the selected works seek to engage the space through gestures that highlight the relationship of the work to the gallery and to the world.
Kenji Fujita will exhibit his Studies for Objects, three sculptures in a variety of ubiquitous materials such as paper bags, cardboard, plaster and plastic ties. Fujita’s work is the raw material of an ornamental undertaking left in its state of rawness. The materials lie on the floor in a seemingly unmonumental manner, as if indifferent to being elevated, as if they could be studies for objects without also being objects. Kitnick describes Fujita’s sculptures as having an “elegance that is better understood in terms of balance. The equilibrium in Fujita’s work is the result of trial and error, the result of spending time, the result of other results.“
Inverting the triangular boundary between art, décor, and utility, Zak Kitnick’s work explores how these parallel worlds borrow from each other equally, acquiring and defusing each other’s radical and banal models. Kitnick brings traditional cover-ups to center stage, riffing off the idea of what it means ‘to screen’ something—to image and project, but also to block out. As this simultaneous blocking and offering up to vision take place, the decorative and the autonomous aspects of art are also put into play; each is blocked and screened. Conceptual art’s interest in décor as at once the antithesis and inevitability of art is opened up here once again. Dichotomies erupt—haptic/optic, image/object, art/decoration—in an infinite regress. The work is color-coated and color-coded at once.
Sam Pulitzer’s work, too, takes ornament as its starting point, but it moves from the interior of the house to the exterior of the body. It imagines architecture as a body, a surface that can be boored out and plugged. Pulitzer’s ‘plugs’ intersect the midline between Fujita’s floor sculptures and Kitnick’s wall vents by literally piercing into the gallery walls with 1” gauged metal ear plugs. This act of formal transgression stems from Pultizer’s interest in reframing the way an object gets “mis/recognized” in the context of an art gallery. Piercing has tribal and/or spiritual origins in a community, but the index of its reference routinely gets appropriated by teenagers as an act of self-expression and individualism. Pulitzer considers the way codes such as these are nuanced and distributed within culture.
Kenji Fujita Lives and works in Staatsburg, New York. Fujita received his B.A. from Bennington College, Vermont, and his MFA from Queens College, New York. He attended the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program. His work has been exhibited at Samson Projects, Boston, Jean Bernier, Athens, Daniel Wienberg Gallery, Los Angeles, Cable Gallery and Luhring Augustine, New York, Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Brooklyn Museum of Art, and the Venice Biennale. He has received awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts and the Pollock-Krasner Foundation. He is currently a Visiting Associate Professor of Studio Art and an MFA faculty member at Bard College. He is also an instructor in the School of Visual Arts’ MFA program.
Zak Kitnick b. 1984 in Los Angeles, CA. Lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Kitnick received his B.A. from Bard College. Selected exhibitions include the Queens Museum, NY, PS1/MoMA Museum, Long Island City, Socrates Sculpture Park, Queens, Landings Project Space, Oslo, Artists Space, and Center for Curatorial Studies, Annandale-on-Hudson. Gallery exhibitions include an upcoming solo show at Clifton Benevento, New York, Rachel Uffner, New York, Bugada & Cargnel, Paris Shane Campbell, Chicago, and Johan Berggren Gallery, Sweden. His work has been written about in The New Yorker, Huffington Post, Art in America, Interview, and is included in the Younger Than Jesus: Artist Directory.
Sam Pulitzer b. 1984 in Fremont, New Hampshire. Lives and works in New York City. He received his B.A. from RISD in 2006 and since then has exhibited at Real Fine Arts, NY, Okay Mountain, Houston, TX, Greene Naftali Gallery, NY, The Emily Harvey Foundation, NY, Cleopatra’s, NY, and Red Eye Gallery, Providence, RI.
