ON SPEC KAORU KATAYAMA / DIANA PUNTAR / GORAN TOMCIC MAY 18 – 26, 2007

Opening Reception: Friday, May 18, 6-8pm

A very short but exceptional show of three emerging artists selected neither by a guiding curatorial premise nor an umbrella theme but who are all working with aspects of ‘Glitz Culture’.

Kaoru Katayama of Japanese origin lives and works in Spain since 1995. Her well-known Tecnocharro is a video fusing traditional dance with techno music brought her instant recognition in 2006 by winning the ARCO Prize for Young Artists Awarded by the Community of Madrid. Dancing in Space and Sobremesa shown at White Box, are also based on various musical traditions and techno sounds. In Dancing in Space two “charras”, dressed in traditional Salamancan costumes perform a go-go dance to the steps of folk-origin rythms. In Sobremesa two gypsies, Julio Gilabert and Salud Molina, perform the rhythm of a ‘soleá compas’ – a dance step in twelve movements. The video was shot in their home – their every day environment where they have for 38 years lived and played together, developing a dialogue based on their shared Gypsy musical heritage.

Diana Puntar is a fast emerging artist living and working in Brooklyn. Her objects, scaled as furnishings, operate as an environment that is at once beautiful and grotesque in its seeming superficiality. The work exists somewhere between a post-minimalist or post-apocalyptic history where radical ideas about form meet nostalgic longings for suburban or space age materials. Puntar’s work thus elicits a series of disturbances in aesthetic and social systems – confusing the useful with the formal and the natural with the built – suggesting parallel breakdowns in contemporary culture. In 2006 Ms. Puntar showed at Small A Projects in Portland, OR, The Samson Projects in Boston, and Supreme Trading in Brooklyn.

Goran Tomcic is an artist living and working in New York. He holds an M.A. in Curatorial Studies from the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, after which he has also worked as a curator of contemporary art, and a free-lance writer. In February 2005, his one-person exhibition “A Shimmering Heart, Silver” at Participant Inc. gallery in New York has been listed as the “pick of the month” in artforum.com. The second installation (from a series of five) of “A Shimmering Heart,” in Gold is scheduled for October 2007 at the Haifa Museum of Art (Haifa, Israel). He has been awarded numerous grants and fellowships and was a MacDowell Colony fellow in 1992 and 1996.

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