Curated by Mimi Cabell and Phoebe Stubbs
Gelman Gallery
20 North Main Street
Providence, RI 02903

Opening Reception - January 6th, 6 - 8 PM
Exhibition Dates - January 7th - February 6th, 2010

Saturday, January 29, 2011

Break It Down

Break It Down is the title of a story by the writer Lydia Davis. In it the narrator desperately tries to quantify a short and painful and love affair in monetary terms. He spent ten days, six hundred dollars, and only came away with an old shirt. The instinct to “break it down” by materializing an intangible and complex feeling into accessible units was the impetus for this exhibition. Breaking something apart makes it manageable.


Break It Down, the exhibition, brings together twenty artists who, like Davis, employ deconstruction as a device for understanding. All the artists shown share a process that involves deconstruction—whether of a system, an object, an image, or an idea. Break It Down is an exhibition that explores complexity through simplicity. It examines deconstruction as both a productive and destructive act. In representing this paradox, Break It Down asks: How do we stop before we’ve gone too far?

Installation shots





More installation shots





Jonathan Wang, BFA '11 Glass

Jonathan Wang created a handmade light bulb as a way to investigate the many complex, now largely mechanized, processes involved in creating a household fixture we see but often hardly notice. When ignited the bulb flashed temporarily and the image of the bright glowing wire was left as a trace burnt onto the interior of the glass.


Alex Temple, BFA '11 Sculpture

Temple drew the face of every Italian hostage killed in the Fosse Ardeatine Massacre of 1944. He used drawing as a means to know those who were killed. By spending time in mausoleum, sitting with every single tomb, he was able to comprehend the severity of what had taken place.

Laura Swanson, MFA '11 D+M

In “Fanon” Swanson breaks down both critical theory for children who experience otherness, and the distance between the audience and the artwork generally observed in galleries and museums. The doll is embedded with an audio book of a text that historically has been employed to incite rebellion. With its heated center “Fanon” acts as both an object of comfort and empowerment.


Melanie Steinway, BFA '12 Illustration

“Forests of July” is an exploration of Melanie Steinway’s relationship between her and her sister. In the animation cat-like characters hand drawn by the artist represent the artist and her sister. Each frame is meticulously drawn, the collection of drawings in the end create the story.


Keith Allyn Spencer, MFA '11 Painting

“Framed” series makes us look twice at the “conventional” images found in store bought frames. Spencer questions how such images become “conventional” and what their proliferation means for the “other” who is not normally represented in this way. His intervention breaks down our perception of “conventional”, also of where artistic interventions lie and what effect they have.

Curtis Singmaster, MFA '11 Sculpture

Singmaster alters found objects as a way to play with their inherent meaning. Traffic barrels control us, but here, beaten down by cars and stripped of their color, Singmaster has controlled our idea of them, suggesting they are injured or suffering.

Liesl Schubel, BFA '12 Glass

Schubel wanted to understand the complex process of casting glass. In order to make a “working” longboard she was required to pull one apart and cast every individual piece. In doing so, she gained a greater understanding of the workings of the board, but also the mold making glass process she was using.


Pablo Roachat, BFA '11 Graphic Design

Rochat’s gestural paintings deconstruct the moment they were painted in. In doing so he captures a sense of a fleeting moment where complete sense is always just out of reach.


Anna Plesset, MFA '11 Painting



Anna Plesset presents six months of her collection of twigs, one found and indexed every day. When she forgot to collect a twig she crafted a fake from clay and gauache. The work examines memory and the way it is sometimes constructed and falsified.

Mark Rice, MFA '11 Printmaking

Rice’s scroll is printed with fourteen stories in Rungish, a phonetic language comprised of fourteen syllables. The language requires the audience to sound out the words, revealing their pornographic content as they are spoken out-loud.

David May MFA '11 Printmaking

May riffs off Rice’s texts. The images he creates are peppered with seductive bouts of color. It is only on closer inspection that the audience can decipher the broken down images for their pornographic content.

Misha Kahn, BFA '11 Furniture

“Deer Things” breaks down our sense of what a cabinet should be. Kahn puts a collection of objects together to make a storage solution to make us smile.


Jason Huff, MFA '11 D+M

Huff examines TIFF code as language. By reversing the TIFF code to make a “palindrome” image, Huff breaks down the TIFF. The results are surprising, sometimes scrambled and broken down, and each one is different.

Stefan Gunn, MFA '11 Printmaking

Gunn’s autostereograms refer to each other. They require the audience to stand and stare in order to see through the presented images to the ones embedded. They rely on us “misusing” our vision, by crossing our eyes, to find the third dimension hidden within.

Kai Franz, D+M Fulbright Fellow '10

On an aluminum sheet Franz presents a physical enactment of Horton Conway’s computer science program, “the game of life”. “46.44 Kg Oxygen” is the trace of the game played. His actions broke the material down, made a computer system physical, and in doing so, distorted the imposed grid.

Emilia Edwards, MFA'11 Printmaking

Edwards uses the graphic style of comic books, creating panels to view the microscopic. The narrative devices of the panels suggest a story that goes nowhere, a cyclical image that relates body to microscopic body part. The panels break down the image, giving a closer view of a detail that seems bodily, but might not be.


Hae Min Choi, MFA'11 Printmaking


Choi presents multi-layered digital images that deconstruct the spaces they represent. They suggest false memories of places and objects. One senses the feeling of grasping for a specific memory by endlessly replacing the images conjured in the quest for the right one. The effect is an image that is never quite whole.

Tuesday, January 25, 2011

Jennifer Cawley, MFA Photography '11



In "Palimpsest: Cauchemars de Mon Père” Jennifer Cawley is at once attempting to understand a father she never knew, and grappling with the consequences of unwanted war, both past and present. “Palimpsest…” points to relationships shorn by war and death, and the enormity of the detritus that remains.


Still from: "Palimpsest: Cauchemars de Mon Père”



DP Boyle, MFA Digital + Media '11





















The methods of many of the artists in “Break It Down” are exercises in constraint and control. Their pieces arise out of routine and measure. In cases where strong currents of whimsy occur, a specific process is still evident. In “Eveready…” DP Boyle follows the impulse of “Break It Down” to an alternate conclusion, the one where, past understanding, deconstruction renders an object useless.

Alexandra Ben Abba, MFA Glass '11




















Ben Abba presents images of her father projected onto herself along with audio of communication between them. By merging images of moments in his life when she was not present, Ben Abba speaks to complexities of communication within family and over distance via digital technologies. The latter has made communication more immediate, but here Ben Abba proves that immediacy does not preclude ease.