Exhibition: Tom Forkin, Byran Krueger, & Tin Nguyen: The World of Which One Tells

321 GALLERY

presents:

The World of Which One Tells

Opening Reception Friday, March 1st, 6-9pm
321 Washington Ave, Brooklyn, NY

321 Gallery is pleased to exhibit new work by Tom Forkin, Bryan Krueger, and Tin Nguyen.

The World of Which One Tells presents work by three Brooklyn artists that address personal home space, technological design, and domestic rituals.

In this exhibition, Forkin, Krueger, and Nguyen direct their attention to what is typically confined to the window of a website, the perspective of a Google Street View, or the page of a Home & Garden book. The work on display is either referenced or made directly from the social, topographical, and commercial systems that we use to navigate our lives today. What is easily overlooked in daily routine is here put on display.

Tom Forkin's Untitled (a hacked Mac power adapter), seemingly discarded on the floor, is frozen in a state of spiraling movement, the swooping cord seeking attention as an appliance might with a life of its own. Another piece, Loaf, is a photograph of a baguette printed to scale with wingtip edges folding outward. Powered by the steady stream of air from a fan, Loaf spins atop a clunky stone base like a garden wind wheel. The science is primitive and the logic absurd, as if Early Man sat down and made an animated gif.

Bryan Krueger's life size photograph of himself taken by a Google Street View car is printed on vinyl and takes over the wall. A spontaneous “selfie,” the artist is posing for the drive-by map makers, and the low image quality of the print brings to mind Super-8 home movies shot in the front yards of suburban homes. With his face blurred out—censored or protected—Krueger chooses to smile and wave, embracing what he cannot control. While his choice is to confront the camera head-on, he is still helpless regarding his placement online. In a second sculpture, selections of vinyl showing a brick barrier, a wooden gate, and a cement wall the color of afternoon shadow are pasted over a neutral gray board. Translucent pieces of red Plexi in direct reference to the bubbly Photoshop paintbrush tool lie on top of the torn up images.

Tin Nguyen’s multi-layered Glove paintings are hung beside each other, like body-less hands. Appropriated from Home Gardening books, Nguyen isolates the stock photography of gloved hands trimming plants and digging holes. The prints are enlarged to the point of image distortion, and the fingers and clippers have been cut around their outlines with the patience and care of a pruner. A kitschy water ripple is discernable in one of the vividly green pieces. A smaller framed work contains the image of a leisure chair found from a design-your-own-cushions website, and the frame itself is enveloped by the camouflage of a backyard landscape.

This show marks the second group exhibition in this space, located on the garden level of a brownstone in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn.
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Since graduating from Pratt Institute, Tom Forkin (1986) has participated in numerous group exhibitions at alternative art spaces in Brooklyn. In 2010, Forkin was selected to take part in the Summer Studio Program at Virginia Commonwealth University. He is currently pursuing his MFA at Rutgers.

Bryan Krueger’s (1988) work has been shown in exhibitions across the U.S. He has recently been published in print as part of Mossless Volume 2 and online as part of thePSDshow.org. In 2011, he received the Tierney Fellowship upon graduating from the School of Visual Arts in New York. He is currently based in Brooklyn, New York.

Tin Nguyen (1988) currently lives and works in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. He has completed a residency at the Pottery Workshop Jingdezhen China, participated in group shows throughout Brooklyn, and has contributed to Pyschiana Magazine. Nguyen graduated from Pratt Institute in 2010.