“Three Thousand Times, Each Hour a Different Terrain”
Opening reception:
Friday July 11, 2014
6:00-8:00pm
Inman Gallery is pleased to present Three Thousand Times, Each Hour, a Different Terrain, an
exhibition of recent work by Titus Kaphar, Wardell Milan, and Demetrius Oliver. The show
opens Friday, July 11th with a reception from 6 to 8, and continues through August 16th.
This will be the fourth time Kaphar, Milan and Oliver have collaborated since their 2006 residencies
at the Studio Museum in Harlem. Although their individual studio practices are distinct in both
tone and media, the affinity is obvious when their work is shown side-by-side.
A consideration of landscape winds through this most recent exhibition, though not in the
traditional sense. The title of the show alludes to Charles Baudelaire, whose writing articulated a
correspondence between his own immediate surroundings and a more elemental world of ideas,
available to the sensitive observer. In their turn, these three artists map their particular
circumstances onto broader cultural terrain. Informed by art history, personal history, and natural
history, studio models, supermodels and scientific models, the worlds described by Kaphar, Milan
and Oliver are sprawling microcosms, expansive in reference and intimate in sensibility.
Demetrius Oliver translates the least accessible natural phenomena – whether too small, too
fleeting or too distant – into photographs, sculptures and works on paper with unassuming
materials and a strict economy of means. The quantum atomic model, an esoteric description of an
imperceptible world predicated on uncertainty, finds its workaday counterpart in the concise
arrangement of a teakettle, some light bulbs and a dinged bucket. The bright sphere in the
photograph Firmament XXVII is, on closer inspection, a convex reflection of a living room with
Oliver stretched out on the couch. This lunar-domestic scene is possibly the pithiest summary of
Oliver’s practice, in which the everyday is slightly alien, and the cosmic is near at hand.
Where Oliver’s cosmology is almost stark, Wardell Milan’s landscape is teeming. For Sunday,
sitting on the bank of Butterfly Meadow Milan photographed a diorama full to bursting with
carefully arranged plants, objects and cutouts from magazines and photos. Models, porn stars,
statues and family members play and recline amid moss bushes and kale trees to form the throng of
associations, half pop and half personal, that infiltrate most contemporary daydreams. Though
more compact formally, Milan’s Lovely Tulip drawings stretch across continents and centuries, back
to the 17th century Dutch tulip craze. Transplants from an economic bubble long past, the
flamboyant, decomposing flowers make apt emblems for the present-day art boom.
Titus Kaphar’s territory is perhaps the most
contested of the three, staked out across competing
histories and cultures. In dismantling and
reconstructing art-historical replicas, Kaphar unearths
buried narratives and assembles makeshift fables. A
tarry thunderhead mashes the sky above Monet’s
Poppy Field in A Change Gone Come. In Founding
Fathers 3, a portrait of George Washington is peeled
back to reveal a past Nigerian king in bronze relief,
one colonial dissident embedded in another. The
surface of Kaphar’s work is just one layer on top of
many, shifting and occasionally rupturing at the
direction of deeper historical currents.
Titus Kaphar (born 1976, Kalamazoo, MI) lives and works in New York and Connecticut. He received his BFA from San
Jose State University in 2001 and his MFA from Yale University in 2006. He was an Artist in Residence at the Studio
Museum, Harlem in 2006 and received the Gwendolyn Knight and Jacob Lawrence fellowship in 2009. His work has been
exhibited in solo shows at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia (2014), Friedman Benda in New York
(2013), SEM Art Gallery in Monaco (2012), Roberts & Tilton in Los Angeles (2009) and the Seattle Art Museum (2009),
and reviewed in Artforum, ARTnews, Art + Auction, The Wall Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times, Art in America and The
New York Times.
Wardell Milan (born 1978, Knoxville, TN) lives and works in New York City. He received his BFA from The University of
Tennesee in 2001 and his MFA from Yale University in 2004. He was an Artist in Residence at the Skowhegan School of
Painting and Sculpture in 2003, the Studio Museum, Harlem in 2006 and the Lower East Side Printshop in 2010. In 2007
he received the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award. His solo exhibitions include OSOMOS Gallery in New York
(2014), Savannah College of Art and Design in Savannah, GA (2013), Louis B. James Gallery in New York (2012), 404
Gallery in Naples, Italy (2011) and Taxter and Spengemann Gallery in New York (2009, 2005). His work has been
reviewed widely, including articles in Artforum, The Village Voice, The New York Sun, Art in America and The New York
Times.
Demetrius Oliver (born 1975, Brooklyn, NY) lives and
works in New York, NY. He received a B.F.A. from the
Rhode Island School of Design in 1998 and M.F.A from the
University of Pennsylvania in 2004, and attended the
Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2004.
From 2004 to 2006 he was an artist resident at the Core
Program in Houston, TX and in 2006 an artist-in-residence
at The Studio Museum, Harlem. Oliver was a Light Work
(Syracuse, NY) artist-in-residence in 2009. His work has
been exhibited widely, with recent solo exhibitions at the
Print Center in Philadelphia (2014), D’Amelio Terras in
New York (2011 and 2008), Virginia Commonwealth
University in Richmond, VA (2009), and The
Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston (2006). In
September 2010 Oliver completed a commission for the
High Line in New York, which included a 25 by 75 foot
billboard, musical performances, and stargazing. His work
has been reviewed in Art in America, The Village Voice, The
New Yorker, Art Lies, The Brooklyn Rail, Artforum, and The
New York Times, among other publications.
For more information, please contact the gallery at info@inmangallery.com, or call 713-526-7800.