19 C&D @ CLEARING

C & D

C L E A R I N G Brooklyn

May 3 - June 26, 2016

C L E A R I N G is pleased to present Zak Kitnick’s second solo exhibition with the gallery entitled C & D. The exhibition includes new bodies of work focused on the visual and physical unpacking of images and objects.

The works in this exhibition originate from two postcards that depict various feline and canine breeds. Kitnick isolates each animal from the original image, enlarging each to fit the height of a two-by-three-foot steel shelving panel. Expanding their content, the industrial panels are then arranged in even succession along the bottom of the gallery walls. Forming a continuous line of animals evoking the durational sequence of a filmstrip, the viewer controls their own rate of reception. A pair of low swinging doors marks the entrance and exit to each gallery, visually continuing the sequence and introducing a physical pause to the experience of being in the exhibition.

As with previous work that engaged with the capacity of taxonomic structures to organize and package a wide variety of information, here, the inherent visual language of such forms of representation is interrupted, dismantled, and transferred to other contexts and mediums. Kitnick works to dilute such hierarchical systems of representation through a serial expansion into actual space. New questions arise just as the significance of the animal as a subject begins to dissipate. In turn, the formerly singular, flat image offered by the postcard has mutated to encompass the impressions of both space and time.

The exhibition is accompanied by a new publication featuring an essay by Ed Halter.