Zoe Strauss Commencement: An Introduction

December 9, 2023 — January 28, 2024

Probably Gallery is honored to present Commencement: An Introduction, the first new exhibition of works by renowned photographer Zoe Strauss in over five years.

Strauss is known internationally for her distinct version of documentary photography. Though made without digital intervention, Strauss’ pictures undermine the authority of the image through repetition, context shifts, and historical reframing. While rooted in specific real events, Strauss’ images resist asserting themselves as objective. They are deeply particular, subjective pictures of the world, and cast doubt over the veracity of the documentary image.

This exhibition presents an introduction to a planned series of encyclopedic books. Our show is a prologue— works that point to specific concerns about place, living in climate disaster, and the problematizing of the objectivity of documentary photography. Commencement began as an examination of what it is to be a person in America living amidst increasing anxiety around global crises. It was initially proposed in September 2016 as Strauss’ application for the 2017 Guggenheim grant, which she was awarded in April of that year. In the intervening months the project took on a different urgency with the election and inauguration of Donald Trump. Her concerns over political and environmental crises immediately became less conceptual and abstract and more an immediate reality.

In response, Strauss turned her energy to developing the 3212 Think Tank. Named for the Doomsday Clock’s prediction of our proximity to global disaster (three minutes to midnight), 3212 is a classroom for teaching leftist politics and culture to high school students. Strauss initiated the think tank within a Philadelphia public high school. Although it is not endorsed as part of the school curriculum, Strauss has been able to work with students for the last five years, bringing new and radical ideas into their sphere. 3212 serves as a laboratory for ideas about the problems of global crisis and a real world outlet for generating concepts driving the Commencement project. It is also at times a site of image making. It serves to extend the project from a thought-experiment, held at critical distance, to something involving real action in the world. The 3212 Think Tank and Commencement have developed in concert, informing one another.

The photographs in the exhibition continue the artist’s exploration of the American landscape and infrastructure, only now to a near total exclusion of human inhabitants. Where Strauss’ earlier works leaned heavily on portraiture and her interactions with her fellow citizens, now we see how the world has been altered by human presence, from the effects of industrial intervention at the level of the climate, to the minor intrusions of the photographer and her position as one that changes the world she moves through.

Zoe Strauss was born in Philadelphia, PA in 1970. She began making photographs after receiving a camera for her 30th birthday. She has exhibited in the 2006 Whitney Biennial, New York, NY and the 2013 Carnegie International, Pittsburgh, PA; She has been the subject of solo exhibitions including The Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, PA, Bruce Silverstein Gallery, New York, NY, DePauw University, Greencastle, IN, The Southwark Community Center, Philadelphia, PA, as well as group exhibitions at The Centraal Museum, Utrecht, NL, and the Philaelphia Museum of Art. Strauss was the subject of a survey exhibition, “Zoe Strauss: Ten Years” at The Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA which travelled to The International Center for Photography, New York, NY. Her work is in the collections of The Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA, The Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA, SFMoMA, San Francisco, CA, and the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL. She has been awarded the Solomon R. Guggenheim Fellowship, The Pew Fellowship in the Arts, The Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Grant, Richard Grubman and Caroline Mortimer Photographer in Residence at The American Academy in Rome, and the United States Artists Fellowship.

Jeffrey Rugh: Aggregate Paintings

September 9 - October 28, 2023

Jeffrey Rugh was raised by historians. His father, an art historian, studied with Thomas Crow. Jeffrey studied with Michael Fried and briefly worked at The Hirshhorn and Walker Art Center. He received his MFA at ArtCenter College of Design, studying with Mike Kelley, Liz Larner, Diana Thater, David Rimanelli, and several other art stars and important critics. In short, he’s about as far from an outsider as one could be. And yet, his practice is mostly unconcerned with the goings on of the art world.

The term “Outsider Artist” is, thankfully, dying. There are ugly implications in it about who is a real artist and who is naturally welcome into the center of the discussion. At the same time, in a world where the phrase “Contemporary Art” doesn’t describe a kind of art or an era of art, so much as a marketplace so particular it might be better understood as a trade association, it is still worth thinking about what kind of art is being made that has aspirations that are disconnected from the instruments and institutions of “Contemporary Art.”

Rugh began showing in the early 2000s. After a few group shows and a solo show that were well received, with press coverage and sales, Rugh’s career took a left turn. There were family and financial necessities, and very quickly a job took up the time and space of his studio practice. It’s a story as old as art school, but he managed to do what many cannot. While spending the last twenty years as an executive in the fashion industry, working for Prada and Louis Vuitton among others, he continued to paint. Only now, there was no idea of an audience beyond his family and friends. There were no concerns about influence, about trends or movements, or about a teleology of art. There was only a guy with a great eye and incredibly particular tastes, tremendous art historical knowledge, and a sense of humor, making paintings that he wanted to look at for a long time.

Aggregate Paintings presents two bodies of work from the last five years. The first is a series of paintings based on terrazzo and concrete. Sometimes these are specific varieties of concrete: the extremely expensive white pavement with rounded pale pebbles that lines Canon Drive in Beverly Hills; the black pavement of Fifth Avenue in Manhattan that is dyed darker to hide the dirt from the constant footfall on that sidewalk. Other paintings are the product of fantasy: luxurious stones and patterns verge on structure but stay in the realm of acompositional painting. The all-over quality of the work speaks to Pollock and late Brice Marden while the rendering and subject resonates with the trompe l’oeil wall paintings of Versailles. The subject, concrete, is the most banal thing and also among the most permanent things culture leaves behind. It is the the shit underfoot and the Roman Empire.

The second body of work comes from Rugh’s desire to live with art that he could never own. When confronted with such a work, Rugh makes his own version. He is fully aware of the legacies of artists that traffic in reproduction of existing artworks, be it Richard Pettibone, Sturtevant, or Mike Bidlo. Rugh’s works however are not motivated by critique of the market or originality. They are acts of devotion to understanding a certain history of painting, to what his father taught him about art as he was growing up, and to keeping beauty close to oneself when possible. For this exhibition Rugh will show two works that are almost replicas of Frank Stella’s Sinjerli series. They aren’t the size, color or composition of paintings that Stella ever made; they are like ones he never got around to. These works can be understood as fan fiction— a genre where people remake culture by rereading it through their own desires. Like the paintings of concrete that show an invisible accumulation of wonders hidden beneath the surface, these paintings ask, what is culture made of and what are those that consume culture made of?

Jeffrey Rugh was born in 1975 and grew up in Chicago, Illinois. He received his BFA from The Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore, MD. and his MFA from ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena, CA. He lives and works in South Orange, NJ. This is his first solo exhibition in nearly 20 years.

July 8 -August 26, 2023

Four On The Floor

In 1973 Earl Young, the drummer for Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes, recorded a drum track for their single “The Love I Lost.” Young played in 4/4 time and hit the kick drum on every beat. By combining this beat (known as four-on-the-floor) with complex use of the hi-hat cymbal on a soul record, Young originated what was to become the standard style of drumming in Disco music. Four-on-the-floor is ubiquitous in dance music now.

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At some point in the 20th Century the pedestal or plinth just became more sculpture. After Brancusi and Duchamp, and after Minimalism, anything that touches the floor in a museum or gallery has to at least be asked if it’s sculpture. And if you’re of a certain disposition you might consider that if the pedestal is sculpture, then symmetrically sculptures would have to be pedestals too.

Now that might seem awful in some sense. Using one perfectly good sculpture as a support for another might make the physically higher sculpture seem more, well, elevated. But drawing a metaphorical frame around some aspect of the world or life so it may be more clearly seen, is one of the highest achievements for an artwork. So life for a sculpture as a pedestal really isn’t so bad. One sculpture may support another, and so on.

• • • •

Conceptual art, and the attendant questions about, “the relationship of human beings to objects and objects to objects in relation to human beings,” to quote Lawrence Weiner, seem to avoid the kind of joyous, sweaty relationships of human being to human being that happen on a dance floor. But a dance floor is a pedestal more than it is a stage, so if you think like a Conceptualist, you can let a dance floor be a sculpture.

• • •

Four On The Floor presents floor sculptures by four artists, stacked on top of each other. Mungo Thomson, Cayetano Ferrer, Darren Bader, and Becky Kolsrud.

Becky Kolsrud (b. Los Angeles, 1984) lives and works in Los Angeles.She received a BS from New York University and an MFA from The University of California, Los Angeles. Selected solo exhibitions have been held at Moran Moran, Los Angeles, CA; JTT, New York, NY; Tif Sigfrids, Athens, GA, and Karma, New York, NY. Selected group exhibitions include Aïshti Foundation, Beirut, Lebanon; Asia Art Center, Taipei, Taiwan; Peter Blum, New York, NY, and Atlanta Contemporary, Atlanta, GA, among many others. Her exhibitions and practice have been covered in Artforum, Interview Magazine, Mousse, The New Yorker, The New York Times, Vogue, and numerous other publications worldwide. Her work is held in the collection of The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA.

Darren Bader (b. 1978, Bridgeport, CT) studied filmmaking and art history at NYU (BFA, 2000). He lives and works in New York. Bader’s conceptual hobbyhorses include: word works, pairings, impossible sculpture, misattribution, object fetishism, and trash sculptures. His exhibitions are often collaborative in nature, exploring and questioning the interconnectedness of seemingly disparate objects through complex (re)arrangements, surprise juxtapositions, and absurd associations. Institutional solo exhibitions include fruits, vegetables; fruit and vegetable salad, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY (2020); (@mined_oud), Madre, Naples, Italy (2017–18); Meaning and Difference, The Power Station, Dallas, TX (2017); chess: relatives, High Line Art, New York, NY (2017); light (and) regret, Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne, Germany (2015); Where Is a Bicycle’s Vagina (and Other Inquiries), or Around the Samovar, 1857, Oslo, Norway (2012); and Images, MoMA PS1, New York, NY (2012). Awarded the Calder Prize in 2013, Bader has taken part in numerous group exhibitions and biennials including Apparition, PHI Center, Montreal, Canada (2021); Mirage: Contemporary Art in Augmented Reality, UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing, China (2020); the 58th Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy (2019); Stories of Almost Everyone, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA (2018); .com/.cn, K11 Art Foundation Pop-up Space, Hong Kong, China (2017); One, No One and One Hundred Thousand, Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna, Austria (2016); 13éme Biennale de Lyon: La vie moderne, Lyon, France (2015); Under the Clouds: From Paranoia to the Digital Sublime, Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art, Porto, Portugal (2015); The Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY (2014); Antigrazioso, Palais de Tokyo, Paris, France (2013); Empire State, Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Rome, Italy (2013); Greater New York, MoMA PS1, New York, NY (2010); and To Illustrate and Multiply: An Open Book, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA  (2008).

Cayetano Ferrer (b. 1981, Honolulu; lives and works in Los Angeles) received an MFA from the University of Southern California and a BFA from the Art Institute of Chicago. Solo exhibitions have been held at Commonwealth and Council (2019); Southard Reid, London (2018); Podium, Oslo (2018); Faena Art Center, Buenos Aires (2017); and Santa Barbara Museum of Art (2015). Selected group exhibitions have been held at Barbati Gallery, Venice (2023); Koppe Astner, Glasgow (2020); Yuz Museum, Shanghai (2019); Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, Oslo (2017); Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia (2017); Hessel Museum of Art, Bard, Annandale-On-Hudson (2015); Swiss Institute, New York (2014), and Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2012). Ferrer is a recipient of the LACMA Art + Technology Lab grant (2015), Artadia Award (2013), and CCF Fellowship (2013).

Mungo Thomson (born 1969, Woodland, CA, based in Los Angeles) attended the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program in New York and the Graduate Fine Art Program at UCLA. His work is held in the public collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Henry Art Gallery, Seattle; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Museum of Contemporary Art, Miami; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Museo Jumex, México City; FRAC Île-de-France, Paris; GAMeC, Bergamo, Italy; and BY ART MATTERS, Hangzhou, China, among others.