NEW YORK, NY.- Peter Blum is presenting an exhibition of new works by Joseph Montgomery entitled Doll Index at 20 West 57th Street, New York. The exhibition runs through December 6th.
Doll Index is a new body of work representing Joseph Montgomery’s continuing exploration of the shim - a tapered wedge of material typically used to fill gaps or spaces between objects to influence their levelness. The exhibition includes monumental wall pieces in lacquered MDF, compositions of cardboard sprayed with plaster, and layered assemblages. Recently, Montgomery has rearranged the repeated shim form into the representation of a figure.
Accompanying the exhibition, the website dollindex.com uses JavaScript to generate all possible doll combinations when given an operator-specified number of shim units as the probability framework for head, shoulder, hip, and calve sizes. Printed wallpaper that covers the east wall of the gallery exhibits 140 of these vectored doll images. Doll Index includes three animations of dolls on flat screen monitors. These videos show the doll perpetually repeating three labors including walking, writing, and birthing. The infinite repetitiousness of the doll anthropomorphizes Joseph Montgomery’s questions about authorship and originality in the labors of image proliferation.
Difference, repetition, and representation inform Montgomery’s image making labors and build the architecture of this exhibition. This framework is supported by the artist’s system of titling each work as “Image” followed by the sequential number at which he completes the object—reinforcing not only the assembly of disparate fragments into composition but also the discord between the materiality of paintings and the immateriality of their dissemination.
Joseph Montgomery was born in 1979 in Northampton, Massachusetts and lives and works in New York, NY. Montgomery received his BA from Yale University and his MFA from Hunter College. Recent solo exhibitions include Five Sets, Five Reps at MASS MoCA in North Adams, MA (2013); and Velveteen at Laurel Gitlen, New York, NY (2013). Group exhibitions include: OK Great Thanks This Is So Ridiculous, ACME, Los Angeles, CA (2014); Painter Painter, The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN, (2013); Curating the Contemporary: Joseph Montgomery and Ned Vena, Kunsthaus Baselland, Basel Switzerland, organized by Kathrin Beer and Samuel Leuenberger; Into the Surface, Brand New Gallery, Milan, Italy (2012); and The 2011 Bridgehampton Biennale, curated by Bob Nickas.
