double take
Participating artists:
Oasa DuVerney
Meredith James
Dana Lok
Reception: Saturday, May 13,4-6pm
May 13 - June 2, 2017
Curated by Guy Ben-Ari & Leah Wolff
AGENCY
20 Jay Street, Suite M14, Brooklyn NY 11201
Gallery hours: Fri - Sun 12 - 6pm & by appointment
Meta Meta Meta LLC is pleased to present Double Take, the inaugural exhibition to be held at AGENCY, featuring works by Oasa DuVerney, Meredith James and Dana Lok, curated by Guy Ben-Ari and Leah Wolff. The exhibition examines the mode of the double, through gestures of duplication, reversal, identification and projection. The title of the exhibition refers to the delayed interpretation and response to what has been seen, exemplifying the difference between looking and seeing.
From a series titled The View From Nowhere, a pair of portraits (Julian Assange and Diamond Reynolds) hang in the gallery by artist Oasa DuVerney. While Assange is the founder of Wikileaks, Diamond Reynolds livestreamed the immediate aftermath of the shooting and death of her boyfriend, Philando Castile, after he was shot by local police during a routine traffic stop. While their personas feature prominently within the dissemination narrative of this information, their faces remain absent within the content itself, existing instead solely within the metadata. Both subjects publish content that reveal social and political oppression, but by showing the portraits as a pair, DuVerney highlights the difference between the two.
In the drawing based on Jan van Eyck’s painting The Arnolfini Portrait titled The Actress Makes a Promise, Dana Lok shows the focal point of the piece, the couple’s hands. In the hand of the bride, the artist places an optical illusion, inviting the viewer to consider two different forms of imaginary space beyond the frame. One is the complete painting to which the image alludes, while the other is the impossible space as represented by the optical illusion.
Panorama Meredith, a full-body costume by Meredith James was part of an installation at the Queens Museum titled Möbius City. In a photo of the installation, the wearer is shown within a model version of James’ apartment, which at first glance appears to be a miniature. The image presents the viewer with an incompatible truth about the scale of the wearer, eliciting a delayed reaction, and compelling the viewer to re-examine the object that is in front of them.
Oasa DuVerney is a Brooklyn-based artist and mother, born in Queens, New York. Selected exhibitions include The Window and The Breaking Of The Window, Studio Museum in Harlem, NYC, NY; Brooklyn Biennial II, BRIC, Brooklyn, NY; Our City, Brooklyn Children’s Museum, Brooklyn NY(2016); Crossing the Line, Mixed Greens Gallery, NYC (2013); MYLFworks Revenge, Momenta Art, Brooklyn, NY (2013); Through A Glass Darkly, Postmasters Gallery, NYC (2012). DuVerney was awarded the Smack Mellon Studio Artist Residency (2014-2015) the LMCC Workspace program residency (2012-2013), a grant from the Brooklyn Arts Council (2011), a grant award from the Citizens Committee For New York City (2010, 2013), and the Aljra Emerge Fellowship by the Aljira Center for Contemporary Art (2007). Publications include The New York Times (2012, 2011), The New York Daily News (2010) and The Guardian UK, 2015. She received her B.F.A. from the Fashion Institute of Technology and her M.F.A. from Hunter College, CUNY.
Meredith James (b. 1982, New York, NY) lives and works in New York. She received her B.A. from Harvard University in 2004 and her M.F.A. from Yale University in 2009. James’ videos and sculptures explore the workings of perception and the fallibility of observation, pursuing the surprising, even disorienting, potential in the world around us. Recent exhibitions include Fantasy Can Invent Nothing New at SculptureCenter, Queens, NY (2016), Catalyst at the Queens Museum, Queens (2015), EAF14 at Socrates Sculpture Park, Queens and a solo show, Land Lock (2014), at Jack Hanley Gallery, New York. She is currently installing a public sculpture on the Rose Kennedy Greenway in Boston.
Dana Lok’s paintings and drawings use source material from the history of painting and cartoons to create uncanny pictures that present perception as a mysterious and magical process. Dana was born in Berwyn, PA and lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. She received her MFA from Columbia University (2015), her BFA from Carnegie Mellon (2011), and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2016). Recent solo exhibitions include Soft Fact, Clima, Milan (2017), and The Set of all Sets, Chewday’s, London (2016). She is currently a resident at the Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program.