I MADE A TERRIBLE MISTAKE: APF LAB
Press Release
Art Production Fund is pleased to present “I MADE A TERRIBLE MISTAKE”
An Installation by Rochelle Feinstein
June 2 to July 23 2009
The installation can be viewed 24/7 as a diorama (seen through LAB’s storefront windows day and night) and as walk-thru exhibition space: Tues -Thurs 11am-6 pm.
APF LAB 15 Wooster Street, New York City
The day after dangling his baby from a hotel balcony Michael Jackson said “ I MADE A TERRIBLE MISTAKE”. The day after that, his remark was adopted by Rochelle Feinstein’s as a signpost for this project (2002-2005).
These “mistakes” are allegories of contemporary life, in both public and private orbits. When a mistake is acknowledged, an imperceptible process of redemption and transformation begin. Jackson, and this phrase, is one conceptual muse for this project. The other, Barry White, so emphatically unapologetic and generous in his promise of sensual redemption, died in the summer of 2003, while Feinstein was in the Art Production Fund residency at Giverny. The conceptual collision of these two icons, sited at Monet’s Garden, led Feinstein to draw upon this uber-synthetic Eden for the creation of “I Made A Terrible Mistake”.
Jackson’s mistakes are displayed in the public arena. Those private “terrible mistakes” that occur naturally in an artists studio are inherent to the process of discovering what “mistake” or wrong, could be made right…of finding a felix culpa (the happy accident) and bring resolution to the irresoluble. Or not. It might just be a bad mistake. Feinstein tests the axiom to the fullest extent, employing it as a premise for the creation of the all works presented here. Each work was specifically made to exist within the context of this installation. . The paintings, photographs, videos, and soundtracks use as their foundation those mistakes and misunderstandings of personal, societal, sexual, moral, environmental natures as well as those formal and material choices that inevitably occur in artmaking.
The exhibition space is bisected into distinct zones. One, inspired by MJ’s bountiful mistakes, contain objects that present irreconcilable mash-ups of painting styles; misreading of intention made substantial and material, low-res videos of the discarded-yet-still living plants at Giverny, digital paintings – bathed in environment of saturated color.
The other zone signifies White’s unrelenting promise of a sexy, rewarding post-Edenic state of unconditional love. It is constructed as an entirely different environment: of fabulous-and-not-so-fabulous moving light; of fluctuating clarity and visibility; straining an inhabitant’s perceptual grasp of objects and space. Barry White’s lamentations of longing and desire leave no room for apologies: his is a Garden of Foreverland that drones enticingly and almost unnoticeably in Laundromats, banks, Wal-Marts – as free-floating an irony from the 20c. as one could desire.
Rochelle Feinstein lives and works in New York. She has exhibited her works nationally and internationally and has been a professor of painting at the School of Art, Yale University, since 1995. A painter, she has also been known to work across varied media, yet from the attitudes, motifs and conventions that are embedded in painting. Recently, Feinstein had solo exhibitions at Momenta Art (Bklyn, NY), and The Surburban (Chicago) in 2008, Ten in One Gallery, 2002, Max Protetch Gallery, 1997, Bill Maynes Gallery, 1996, in New York, among many others. Her work has been reviewed in Artforum, TimeOut, The Village Voice, Tema Celeste, Artnews, Art in America, BOMB, The Paris Review, The New York Times, The New Yorker Magazine, and other publications.
Special thanks to Soho Mews for generously donating this space to Art Production Fund.
For more information please contact Art Production Fund at 212 966 0193 or staff@artproductionfund.org.
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