MICHELE ALPERN | PROJECT SPACE
November 4 – December 17, 2016
Opening Reception: Friday, November 4, 6-9pm
In the gallery’s Project Space, Michele Alpern will present small drawings composed of very fine pencil marks on paper, mounted in books. They depict edges, focusing on the borders between spaces. The very small lines themselves consist mainly of the beginning and ending, the transition, of a mark on paper. The drawings are highly elliptical, implying fugitive spatial relationships, and complications between figure and ground. Their sequential placement in books foregrounds temporal relations as well as spatial ones. The books of drawings are viewed at a table with chairs, eliding the intimate and the public.
The materials in this work—ordinary paper, pencil, binders, simple wooden table and chairs—are deliberately unassuming. The drawings are next-to-nothing while also full of care: a tension that for Alpern has connotations about our existence.
Michele Alpern is an artist and a writer. She pursued a multidisciplinary program at university, interested in the study and practice of art, film, and literature, and holds a bachelor’s from Rutgers and a master’s from Columbia. She continues to work across media, in hybrids of drawing, painting, installation, video, and writing. Her work has been exhibited in the New York City area, where she lives.