Alexander and Bonin

Alexander and Bonin is pleased to announce the opening of a three artist exhibition including works by Willie Doherty, Mona Hatoum, and Rita McBride on Friday, November 10, 2017. Doherty’s No Return (2017), a single channel projection, will be installed in the video gallery. No Return was shot in an area once known as the “cradle of Western Pennsylvania’s steel industry,” before suffering from its collapse in the 1980s. While the work engages with the landscape as it looks today, it also approaches it as both a repository for the memories of past experiences and a witness to the ravages of socio-economic change and ecological degradation. Photographs taken in the same location will also be on view. Presenting the town’s derelict buildings and decaying urban landscape, the images are suffused with a sense of unease that echoes the site’s past social, economic, and ecological anxieties. Mona Hatoum’s SP Atelier, an installation of drawings, embroideries, objects, and photographs gathered during a residency in Sao Paulo, provides a rare window on the artist’s process. The work includes samples of materials and drawings of art works proposed for her solo exhibition at Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, Brazil. SP Atelier shows the significance of travel and exploration in Hatoum’s practice, and her interest in creating work outside of a fixed, permanent location. ‘I like to work in different contexts and often, when I am invited to show my work abroad, I like to spend a lot of time in that location, making work with local materials, fabricators, and craftspeople.’1 Also included in the exhibition is the recent work Untitled (wall cabinet) II, 2017, containing ambiguous and sensual glass forms, which despite being solid, appear to remain in a molten state. A solo museum exhibition of Hatoum’s work, Terra Infirma, is on view at the Menil Collection through February 25th and will travel to the Pulitzer Foundation, St. Louis in April, 2018. Terra Infirma brings together a group of major sculptures and installations from American and European collections. Rita McBride’s new work, Guide Rails with Hubcaps, takes the form of white-washed split rail fencing in modular units which direct the viewer’s eye to a cinematic tableau of six vintage hubcaps. A synergy is created by pairing these recognizable forms outside of their expected context, and exemplifies McBride’s practice of changing or subverting an object’s connotations. Explorer, McBride’s survey exhibition currently on view at WIELS in Brussels, includes an installation of Guide Rails which spans all three floors of the space and engages in a dialogue with the building’s architecture and a selection of works from 1992 to the present. A new commission by McBride, Particulates (2017), recently opened at Dia:Chelsea and is on view through June, 2018. Particulates is inspired by time travel, the principles of light and space, and quantum physics. The materials of McBride’s Particulates include water molecules, surfactant compounds, and the beams of high-intensity lasers.

Alexander and Bonin is pleased to announce the opening of a solo exhibition of photographs by Jonathas de Andrade on Friday, November 10, 2017. A new series of photographic prints by Jonathas de Andrade will be on view in the lower level gallery. Drawing from image stills of his acclaimed film O Peixe (2016), de Andrade has created a series of seven photographic prints, titled O espirito das águas/ The water spirits. Shot in the State of Alagoas in northeast Brazil, the photographs present fishermen as they enact a form of ritual, in which, after catching their prey, they embrace the fish in their arms until its death. To the uninformed viewer, these photographs could very well depict a true animistic rite. This sensually loaded action, however, is one that the artist himself has invented in order to highlight the frequent exoticizing style of ethnographic reportage. The photographs’ soft focus, their bright and warm colors further reinforce the conventional aesthetics of anthropological depictions. Combining nuances of fiction and artifice, Jonathas de Andrade subverts our assumptions and confuses our sensation of truth. The series is co-published by Alexander and Bonin, New York, and Galeria Vermelho, São Paulo. Jonathas de Andrade (b. 1982, Maceió, Brazil) lives and works in Recife. The artist uses photography, installation and video to traverse collective memory and history, making use of strategies that shuffle fiction and reality. De Andrade collects and catalogues architecture, images, texts, life stories and recomposes a personal narrative of the past. Recent solo museum exhibitions include Museu de Arte do Rio (2014-2015); Museu de Arte de São Paulo (2016-17); The Power Plant, Toronto (2017); New Museum, New York (2017); and Museo Jumex, Mexico City (2017). De Andrade has participated in the New Museum Triennial, New York (2011); 29th São Paulo Biennial (2011); Istanbul Biennial (2011); Lyon Biennial (2013); Performa15, New York (2015); 32nd São Paulo Biennial (2016); and SITE Santa Fe (2016). Jonathas de Andrade's work was also included in Under the Same Sun: Art from Latin America Today at the Guggenheim Museum, New York (2014), Question the Wall Itself at the Walker Art Center (2016-17) and Unfinished Conversations: New Work from the Collection at The Museum of Modern Art, New York (2017).