Jamie Isenstein

Galerie Giti Nourbakhsch and Meyer Riegger proudly present Quiet Manor, an exhibition by New York City based artist, Jamie Isenstein. By way of Réne Magritte and a not-so-empty living room, Quiet Manor considers dualities of absence and presence, life and death, real and fake.

Upon entering the gallery, the first work a visitor might see is Smoking Pipe, 2006, a small table with a pipe placed upon it. The pipe looks as if it has recently been set down, and smoke continues to waft from its bowl. Upon further inspection, the visitor might realize that the pipe is continuously smoking, an infinite exhale. This is no ordinary pipe, perhaps it is not even a pipe at all. The smoker is absent and the pipe has taken on the task of breathing.

One might expect to find the missing smoker sitting in a near-by wingback chair, Armchair, 2006. Though the chair appears in fact to be empty, it contains an uncanny presence all its own. Where the “arms” and “legs” of the chair should be, human arms and legs squirm and fidget. In Armchair, 2006, the names of body parts we use as metaphors to describe parts of a chair have been replaced by the real thing.

Magritte’s famous painting that was not a pipe left us to wonder about the difference between what is real and what is metaphor and how we often confuse the two. In an attempt to probe this question, Isenstein will use her arms and legs to replace the chair’s arms and front legs for the duration of the exhibition. She will sit inside the upholstery for hours at a time with occasional short breaks. When Isenstein is on break, naturally the chair will fall forward without its front supports. A Will Return sign will indicate when the performance will resume and the chair will return to form.

Also in the gallery, Companion Portraits, 2006, hangs on the wall. These two photographic portraits depict Isenstein and Skeleton (a character Isenstein often uses in her work) in profile. The photographs are hung so that the two subjects face each other. The style of the work is drawn from 15th century Renaissance portraits. Typically known as “companion portraits”, these paintings often portray the master of the house and his wife. In further expanding upon confusions of absence and presence, or life and death. Companion Portraits, 2006 asks who is the Master of the House; Skeleton, the interior structure of our bodies and the symbolic physical manifestation of our absence, or the artist who’s presence completes the exhibition. The answer will never be known. As these two profile portraits must always accompany each other, the subjects are caught in a never-ending starring contest, a showdown of wills in which neither will win nor lose.

Jamie Isenstein was born in 1975 in Portland. She lives and works in New York City.

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Lali Chetwynd presents a temporary installation containing a narrative puppet show in three acts that draws from key literary sources including the Bible, John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667) and Marx and Engels’ German Ideology (1846). The first puppet show re-enacts the expulsion from Eden, the second The Utopia in which the Division of Labour no longer exists. A short dance works as an interlude in between the puppet shows. The desperate and pathetic Dance expresses grief and longing for these ideal states. The Acts will be repeated 7 times in an improvised mechanization to Alexander Tucker’s Live music.

Chetwynd makes oil paintings and stages theatre performances in the unruly spirit of carnival, circus or Marx Brothers comedy. The dialogue between these two strands of her practice rests not simply in the way that both deal with constructions of fantasy, but in the process of their making. Like the finely painted miniature pictures in her series on the absurdist theme of the Bat Opera, the props, costumes and scenery for her theatre pieces are painstakingly handmade from a bricolage of discarded materials that she recycles, including fabric, cardboard and gouache paint. An equivalence between the stage and the arena of the canvas is proposed in the work, the oil paintings appearing as imagined set designs for as yet unrealised, or perhaps unrealisable, productions.

Lali Chetwynd was born in 1973 in London. She lives and works in London.

Jamie Isenstein
Quiet Manor

28.04.06, 21:00 Spartacus Chetwynd, Performance
The Fall of Man, A Puppet Extravaganza !