(Long Island City,
NY, March, 2004) – P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center presents
a cycle of new drawings based on an ongoing story New York-based
artist Ernesto Caivano (b. 1972, Madrid, Spain) has been
developing titled After the Woods.
In the narrative, the woods symbolize an alternative reality
informed by folklore, fairytales and contemporary technology.
The epic tale is centered on the reunion of a young man
and woman after a separation of 1,000 years. During their
time apart, the man becomes a knight and the woman transforms
herself into a spaceship. While her metamorphosis represents
the advancement of intelligence culminating in technological
development, his transformation triggers the evolution and
expansion of the natural landscape. All of the creatures,
and the forest itself, grow and change with the pair, all
learning how to reconcile their individual abilities to
alter the environment. Each of his skillfully rendered drawings
informs the others and all are subsumed by a coherent, total
experience that is motivated by the imaginative narrative
Caivano has constructed.
For P.S.1, Caivano debuts a “selection” of new
drawings from the chapters of After the Woods:
Love of Philapores; Traps, Screens and Offerings; and Last
Escape. The drawings depict various scenes of the knight,
the princess, the landscape and struggling birds named “philapores”
on whose feathers information and code is transferred between
the separated couple. Thus, in order to reunify with his
lost wife, the knight is obsessed with acquiring these magical
feathers. The birds, incapable of conventional flight but
able to traverse through dense matter; struggle to release
the feathers from the bags and to decipher the code they
carry. The philapores are ultimately after the same end
as the characters and the inhabitants of the woods: the
control and dispersion of information and the way it affects
the land.
Ernesto Caivano was born in Madrid, Spain and currently
lives and works in New York. He has studied at The Cooper
Union and Columbia University in New York. Selected recent
group shows include My Sources Say Yes (2003),
Guild and Greyshkul, New York; Terrarium (2003),
Bronx River Art Center, Bronx, NY; Druid Wood as a Superconductor
(2003), Brooklyn, NY; Game Over (2003), Grimm/Rosenfeld,
Munich; Group Show (2003), curated by Clarissa
Dalrymple, Grant/Selwyn Fine Art, Los Angeles, CA; Shallow
Interiors (2002), Rivington Arms Gallery, New York.
Upcoming exhibitions in 2004 include the Whitney Biennial
at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and a
solo show at Richard Heller Gallery in Los Angeles.
This exhibition is curated by P.S.1 Assistant Curator Amy
Smith Stewart. After the Woods is made possible
by James Family Foundation.
For more information, please contact Rachael Dorsey, P.S.1
Press Office, at press@ps1.org
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