Andrea Bowers / Guy Richards Smit

Opening reception Saturday, December 16, 6-8pm

Room 01: Sara Meltzer Gallery will present Andrea Bowers : Intimate Strangers, an exhibition of video and drawings that highlights gestures made by individuals in crowds. The gestures focused on are extreme or immoderate behaviors of crowds such as obscene hand gestures, exposed body parts and drunkenness. In these expressive and actionist gestures resides the hope and faith that individuals can refuse to become numbingly detached from each other and instead could become intimate strangers.

In her signature photo realist style, rendered in colored pencil and graphite, and presented on gold-foiled backgrounds, Bowers will present a group of her most recent large-scale drawings. The drawn gestures are taken out of the field of the spectacle and then reproduced within the painterly field of gold ground. The figures and gestures were chosen to reference the idealized figures of Renaissance iconography while the actions depicted contradict the Platonic idealism often represented in classical imagery.

These large drawings are accompanied by a filmic video installation entitled Hard Center. The work is created from footage recorded by the artist on the Las Vegas Strip on New Year’s Eve 2000 and exists as one piece created by the deliberate positioning of two sets of video footage next to one another. The action of the figures moves inward and the cuts wipe toward the center where all of the images melt together suggesting a dialectic where intimacy and cultural centrality exist simultaneously.

Intimate Strangers is Los Angeles based artist, Andrea Bowers, second solo show with Sara Meltzer Gallery. The gallery is also proud to announce that Andrea Bowers’ work has been selected for inclusion in the Statements section of the Basel Art Fair which will be presented this upcoming June 2001. Curator, Paola Morsiani will include Bowers in the upcoming exhibition Object Plural which will open at CAMH in Houston in March 2001. In February 2000, Sara Meltzer Gallery exhibited her work in the Project Room section of ARCO, the Madrid Fair; she was selected by Carlos Basualdo, Francesco Bonami, Hou Hanru, Rosa Martinez, and Octavio Zaya. Bowers has been included in numerous museum exhibitions including this past fall in an exhibition at INOVA (Institute of Visual Arts), in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, curated by Marilu Knode, where she presented a 3-channel video installation with accompanying audio. Goldman Tevis Gallery in Los Angeles presented a solo exhibition of her work in early 2000. Additionally, she was included in Francesco Bonami’s Unfinished History which was exhibited at the Walker Art Center and traveled to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, Amy Cappellazzo’s Making Time presented at the International Center for Contemporary Art in Palm Beach and traveling to the UCLA Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, in Ursula Frohne’s Video Cultures at the ZKM in Karlsruhe and Diana Thater’s A Living Theater at the Salzburgen Kunstvein, among others. Additionally, the Sara Meltzer Gallery will present a selection of small-scale works at the Armory Fair in New York in February, 2001.

Room 02 / Video Wall: Sara Meltzer Gallery will present Guy Richards Smit: I’m Mean Because I Like You. Comprised of a new three channel video work accompanied by his latest watercolors, Smit continues his interest in satire and the melodrama of every day. Continuing to caricature his own experiences by taking on a series of self referential and familiar characters, Smit has continued his personal, sometimes dark, sometimes humorous, unsolved narrative.

Based in Brooklyn, Guy Richards Smit has exhibited at Roebling Hall, the Havanna Biennial, Thicket Gallery, Legion Arts, Geoffrey Young Gallery, Greene Naftali Gallery, and the Waiting Room (UK) among other venues.

Room 01: Andrea Bowers, Intimate Strangers
Room 02: Guy Richards Smit, I’m Mean Because I Like You