“3 Rooms — Shana Lutker, David Kennedy Cutler, Sara Greenberger Rafferty”

D’Amelio Terras, New York
February 9 – March 15, 2008

D’Amelio Terras is pleased to present three rooms, a sequel exhibition featuring three conceptually-based, emerging artists — Shana Lutker, David Kennedy Cutler, and Sara Greenberger Rafferty

Shana Lutker

Los Angeles-based artist Shana Lutker questions the way history is recorded, calling attention to the blurred line between the subjective and the objective. Reflecting her interest in Sigmund Freud’s writings on dream analysis and civilization, Lutker will present sculptures and photographs that explore the problems inherent in the documentation of civilization. Lutker plays with notions of scale, representation, and display as she investigates psychological and subjective associations between objects. Appearing industrial and alienated, Lutker’s sculpture of a large grey clock points to the dreary reality that the measurement of time is the foundation of modern industrial civilization. In Lutker’s photographs, by eliminating contextual information, subjects appear detached, surreal, and dream-like. Placed in front of a bleached, white background, a National Geographic magazine appears as an isolated object analogous to the figure on its cover—a boy hunting in the water with a dead white bird fastened to his head as a decoy. Lutker’s works read as incomplete, unfulfilling archetypes.

Shana Lutker received her MFA from UCLA in 2005. Her solo exhibition, “Combined Faulty Acts,” curated by Jeffrey Uslip, is currently on view in the Project Room at Artists Space, New York. In 2007, Lutker was featured in “Passengers,” curated by Jens Hoffmann at the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts. She has exhibited at the 2006 California Biennial at The Orange County Museum of Art, Room Gallery at the University of California at Irvine, Wetterling Gallery in Stockholm, Sweeney Gallery at UC Riverside, Tang Museum at Skidmore College, Harris Lieberman Gallery, ART2102 in Los Angeles, and Kunstverhein Langenhagen in Germany.

David Kennedy Cutler

In David Kennedy Cutler’s large-scale sculpture, “The Greatest,” five plaid-flannel shirts frozen in semi-figurative positions exist amongst a surging pile of ash-covered boards. The dramatic tableau revolves around a central figure: a suspended spectral shirt dangles from above, its plaid grid rendered in multi-toned band-aids, its inner lining a chewed skin of red and purple bubblegum. Below, four plaid shirts— dusted in ashes— lurch toward the figure above. The scene stutters through various representations of historical drama: an echo of the Baroque’s counter-reformation, the break-up of the raft of Romanticism, and the propagandized poses of Nationalism. The plaid shirts are a proxy grafted onto the fray: a symbol of the short-lived grunge movement of the early 1990’s, perhaps the last localized and unadulterated alternative scene of the 20th century. The bodiless, ethereal plaid shirts are trapped in a history that is not fragmentary, but is a ritual of cultural oppositions. Are the colorless, leached shirts below tethered to an earthly realm, struggling towards attainment? Are they in phantasmic rapture? Are they perpetrators of a sacrificial act?

David Kennedy Cutler received his BFA from Rhode Island School of Design in 2001. He has had two solo exhibitions at Nice & Fit in Berlin, Germany, and has an upcoming show there in Fall 2008. He is curating an exhibition opening March 15^th at the Dumbo Arts Center in Brooklyn entitled “Fresh Kills.” He has exhibited at Galerie Michael Janssen in Berlin in “Blood Meridian” curated by David Hunt, Postmasters in New York, and Rivington Arms in New York.

Sara Greenberger Rafferty

Rooted in Vaudeville, slapstick, and 1960’s stand-up routine, Sara Greenberger Rafferty’s work uses comedy as an accessible language through which one can investigate political, social, historical, and interpersonal concerns. Rafferty integrates gouache, photography and found objects into her sculpture. An upended table, redeployed as an inverted and disrupted stage, serves in an odd duality as both barrier and site of refuge for the female comic performer Carol Burnett. Through her transformation of a domestic object into a theatrical prop and her imagery of a female comedic icon, Rafferty calls attention to the role of gender within comedic enterprise. Rafferty’s use of the comic as a solo performer emphasizes the role of individual agency—creating a tension between staged performance and everyday life. Altering temporal linearity and logic, Sara Greenberger Rafferty’s table exists in a rewound moment in time, leaving evidence of an action that has taken place while suggesting action to come.

Sara Greenberger Rafferty received her MFA from Columbia University in 2005. In 2008, she will have a solo exhibition at The Kitchen, organized by Matthew Lyons and participate in group exhibitions including “Fresh Kills” at the Dumbo Arts Center in Brooklyn; “Jack Ass” at Susan Inglett Gallery in New York; and “Untitled”, curated by Sara VanDerBeek, at Guild & Greyshkul in New York. She will Recent solo exhibitions include P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center in New York and Sandroni Rey Gallery in Los Angeles. She has exhibited at Artists Space in New York, Museum 52 in New York, Sunday in New York, Mary Boone Gallery in New York, Wallspace Gallery in New York, the Portland Institute of Contemporary Art in Portland, and Sutton Lane in Paris.

Lucien Terras.

“3 Rooms — Shana Lutker, David Kennedy Cutler, Sara Greenberger Rafferty”