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Fitting into spaces is what people who dwell in cities, especially NYC, do. We fit a lifetime of accumulated matter into minuscule apartments, bodies into subway cars, varying degrees of education and talent into varying degrees of annoying jobs. We fit booze into lunch hours and miniature dogs into purses. We structure lives around a city that both hugs us close and slaps us hard. We turn everything into something else, and then sell it for more. We are peripatetic; nomads tramping the same 28 miles over and over again, recontextualizing every ghetto into gold. |
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Floating Galleries: Defining a place without a space – Emily Steinfeld
Fitting into spaces is what people who dwell in cities, especially NYC, do. We fit a lifetime of accumulated matter into minuscule apartments, bodies into subway cars, varying degrees of education and talent into varying degrees of annoying jobs. We fit booze into lunch hours and miniature dogs into purses. We structure lives around a city that both hugs us close and slaps us hard. We turn everything into something else, and then sell it for more. We are peripatetic; nomads tramping the same 28 miles over and over again, recontextualizing every ghetto into gold. The curator and creator of “Floating Galleries,” Kat Griefen, understands this molding, this movement and elasticity of city life and integrates it into her idea of a traveling gallery. A gallery that, instead of being a fixed destination, is more of a mental space, a lofty helium balloon that every so often grounds itself with the moorings of an artist. Every new opening offers, not only a new set of works, but also a new environment for display. Instead of the having the art fit into the space, the space bends to fit the artist, putting the artist’s work first and then finding the space to suit their needs. Sometimes using traditional galleries for its home, sometimes not, the gallery, because of its lack of overhead, is free to show all kinds emerging and mid-career artists that might not be getting much attention from the rest of the art world.
Floating Galleries’ second show includes new paintings by John Griefen, an abstract expressionist, early works by Oded Halahmy, an Iraqi artist working mainly in bronze cast sculptures, and Ray Ogelsby whose work straddles the line of sculpture and painting. Utilizing common materials such as plywood with a dramatic employment of color, Ray Ogelsby’s work looks both idiosyncratic and utilitarian. I talk to Kat Griefen and Ray Ogelsby on a day that is spitting rain, coating the glass front of the gallery’s current location at 137 Greene Street with a layer of foggy moisture. In the humid café next door, we discuss how the gallery came to be, Ray’s work and the more involved relationship Ms. Griefen wants to cultivate between gallerist and artist.
Emily Steinfeld: So, how did the idea of Floating Galleries come about?
Kat Griefen: I was in graduate school and I was writing a lot about Frank O’Hara and his relationship with this painter Grace Hartigan, one of the few of the New York School who had any fame, whose work played between abstraction and figuration, and the more I learned about his role in the artists’ lives, a more traditional idea of the relationship with the artist, really developing the work with the artists, the more it became interesting to me. Every time Grace Hartigan would make a new painting, Frank O’Hara would come over, open a bottle of wine, and discuss it. And that’s exactly the kind of relationship I’m developing with all the artists that I’m working with. For instance, with Ray, I have been trying to push more in the direction of stuff like “Stack” (of the piece Engel and Stack), but I only have so much of a hand in it. Really what this gallery is about is working with a small group of artists, watching their work grow and being there in a supportive capacity.
ES: [To Ray Ogelsby] How did you get involved with Kat Griefen and Floating Galleries?
Ray Ogelsby: Kat’s dad [John Griefen]. John and I were in a bar so I don’t really remember this…(laughs) but Kat’s got a great memory, she would.
KG: We were talking about color one night, I remember this very specifically. We were talking about primary colors and you told me that you were painting barns, and then I didn’t see him for another four months!
ES: The outside of literal barns or…
RO: No, like images of barns. It was that Upstate influence—lots of flat color—lots of green, lots of blue, lots of red. I think there’s more depth in a landscape painting than there is when you’re in an actual landscape. Just standing there, its different than when you have to fake that sort of space. It’s too big to comprehend when you’re just standing there. Really, it’s just sort of flat when you look at it, especially when you come from the city because you’re so used to an excess of special relationships and scale. So I think I got interested in singular units of color.
KG: (laughs) I was really interested in what he was saying about color so I kind of disregarded the whole barn thing.
ES: [To Kat Griefen] What role do you play in the development of Ray’s work? Are you active in his artistic process?
KG: With the work in this show, I sat with each of his pieces for months, a couple hours at a time as they got finished. I was trying to figure out what the common element was in all of the work, even though, technically, they all look very different, and I think I figured it out—Jackson Pollock has this thing where people can look into his paintings from all over the space. There’s an interior and an exterior and you can enter the piece from a lot of different places but his spaces always recede, then come back. I think that Ray’s work is just the opposite. They come at you and then recede—every single piece has an “out,” there’s always an exit point. Some of them are bold or dark or a little sad, but there’s always an “out” which makes them ultimately hopeful. The pieces can feel infinite that way—like the lines curve and go out into space and, when you turn away and look back, you’re not sure if it’s going to be in the same place. They slip and they’re kind of tricky but they have this playful…it’s not exactly optimistic but they have the potential to be. Potential movement.
RO: I think they’re kind of romantic. I think they like the idea of being things, but don’t really believe in them.
ES: Like, “I don’t believe in love, but I’m desperately in love.”
RO: Yeah, or “I believe in peace but I don’t think it will ever happen.”
ES: Or “I’m a communist but communism can never work.”
RO: Yeah! That kind of duality we approach our day-to-day with. We are always in conflict. Everything is a visual queue about yourself and how you see the world and how you operate
ES: What does Floating Galleries hope to achieve?
KG: It’s about servicing the artists. A gallery doesn’t have to be a physical space. It’s not about that anymore, especially with technology. Someone asked me when this gallery began—“well how do I find the next show” and I told them that it’s the same as with any other show; you look online, you get an invitation to a salon, you walk past the space. The gallery idea, or my conception of it, is halfway between something that’s very traditional—something that goes back farther into the history of art with the relationship between collector and dealer, gallerist and artist—a balance between that older conception and the movement of the gallery itself. That makes it fresh.
Floating Galleries has held two opening so far, displaying the works of artists such as Nicola Lopez, Rob Van Erve, David Gilbert, Theo Angel, Meredith Drum, Sono Osato, Clay Andrews,Trillion Clarke, Adina Pliskin and Kristen Schiele. Look for their next location on their forthcoming website.
