Kate MacGarry is pleased to announce Never Uses, Josh Blackwell’s fourth solo exhibition at the gallery. Blackwell has created an installation from their series Plastic Baskets: found plastic bags embroidered with wool, silk and paper. The bags’ brightly coloured forms will cascade across the main wall of the gallery and onto a casual mural painted in situ. The bags are suggestive of tribal masks, body parts, amateur maps and broken computers.
Blackwell began this series of works during a residency at the Delfina Foundation in London in 2005. Exploring the overlaps between convenience, redundancy, and excess, Blackwell transforms the ultimate disposable object, the plastic bag, into something precious, elegantly crafted and obsessively detailed. The bags are collected by the artist as they find them in New York City, and are accepted in their degraded form. They undergo various processes of alteration, from simple to elaborate, small to large and low key to highly coloured, in the artist’s quest to make something very ordinary into something extraordinary.
Josh Blackwell, born 1972 in New Orleans, lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Blackwell studied at Bennington College and CalArts. Recent exhibitions include: Our Haus, Salon 94, New York, 2013; A Conspiracy of Detail, Mackintosh Museum, Glasgow School of Art, Glasgow, Scotland, 2013; Glaze, Galerie Chez Valentin, Paris, 2012;Josh Blackwell and Roger White, Riverside Art Museum, Riverside, CA, 2011; A New Hook: Rethinking Needlework, Museum Bellerive, Zurich, Switzerland, 2011; Winter in America, Tanja Pol Galerie, Munich, Germany, 2011 and Material Issues and Other Matters, CANADA, New York, NY, 2010.
