143 Reade is a private gallery in a residential building in Tribeca.
“Recent Ruins”
Jedediah Caesar
Nicole Cherubini
David Finegan
Denise Kupferschmidt
Julia von Eichel
March 21 – June 22, 2013
By Appointment
“In the dominant conception ruins are old, they have an “age-value” which is imperative to their legal and cultural-historical appreciation. Judged by this criterion, modern ruins become ambiguous, even anachronistic. In their hybrid or uncanny state they become antonyms of the modern and blur established cultural categories of purity and dirt: in short, they become matter out of place – and out of time.”
– Quoted from the project website of
RUIN MEMORIES: Materiality, aesthetics and the archaeology of the recent past
The third exhibition organized by Lucien Terras at 143 Reade Street features five artists who work primarily as sculptors. This show explores a selection of wall works that combine elements of both painting and sculpture. The materiality amongst the different wall works evokes artifacts of cultural and historical interest yet point to present times. Archeologists of the now, these five artists unearth different potentials through a variety of different mediums, whether it be traditional – Nicole Cherubini’s clay works, David Finegan’s bas reliefs, Denise Kupferschmidt’s wall paintings – or completely idiosyncratic as with the works of Jedediah Caesar and Julia von Eichel.
Jedediah Caesar’s medium is his own material – a unique amalgamation of resin, earth and household organic and inorganic detritus. Each panel, layered with raw debris and sloping patterns of muted, secondary-colored resins, has been sliced from a solid cube filled with collected objects.
Nicole Cherubini employs her clay packaging materials as the foundation for her terra cotta casts. Her use of clay recalls the material’s rich history, while simultaneously emphasizing the present by pushing beyond the traditional practices of its art form. Mounted on the wall, terra cotta and earthenware act as unruly canvases whose contours guide the path of gleaming drips of glaze. These splashes of color and texture adorn the surfaces of her abstract forms, creating depth and movement from mark making.
David Finegan has developed a sophisticated approach to hand carving low reliefs fabricated from rudimentary building materials. Through a labor-intensive process of molding and casting, the artist contemporizes the use of a classical technique by way of his own invented imagery. Evidence of the artist’s hand within a mechanical process is present in the precarious emergence of story and subject matter.
Denise Kupferschmidt paints large statuesque females directly onto the wall, which she refers to as “Crude Idols.” These oversized Cycladic figures rendered in flat black and white acrylic house paint conjure the elegance of Malevitch and Matisse divulged into mass market.
