Carriage Trade

Social Photography II

peter scott — 2012-03-01T19:59:06Z

Social Photography II is the second installment of a carriage trade benefit exhibition focusing on the relatively new medium of cell phone photography. Emphasizing no particular theme beyond how the cell phone camera is most often used, both artists and non-artists were invited to submit images from their phones and email them to carriage trade. The images will be printed on 5” x 7” paper and installed in a grid in the gallery.

As cell phone cameras become more ubiquitous, their function continues to evolve. Encompassing the varied roles of snapshots, visual notes, discrete picture taking, or the immediacy of citizen journalism, the cell phone camera lacks the intentionality of a point-and-shoot, resulting in a more direct recording of the “everyday.” Because of the proximity of cell phone images to the spoken word and text-based communication, the pictures are often a kind of visual shorthand to fill the gaps in between.

Social Photography II cell phone images can be viewed on:

Prints are available now on a first-come, first-serve basis and are limited to an edition of five. Please indicate your top five choices when paying at the PayPal checkout*. We will make every effort to ensure you receive one of your top picks.

Photograph purchase & pick-up:

by December 18: available December 20 (closing event)
on December 20 (closing event): available December 22

*Under "Review your information" click "Add special instruction to the seller" and list top 5 choices: "1)Artist Name-Title, 2)Artist Name-Title, 3)..4)..5)..."

image: Katarina Elven, Eclipse, 2011

POP Patriotism 2002

peter scott — 2011-09-12T22:56:18Z

POP Patriotism, curated by Peter Scott at Momenta Art in September 2002, is being re-presented at carriage trade from September 22 to November 13, 2011. A note on the re-presentation of POP Patriotism in 2011:

In the panicked days, weeks, and months following September 11, 2001, many Americans were too overwhelmed to be aware of the way in which their fear was being appropriated by certain factions within government and business to further a set of goals, often having little to do with "security" or "freedom." An attack that seemed to "come from nowhere" stimulated an aggressive series of government policies and ad campaigns by businesses that reflected an acute understanding of the opportunity that this traumatic attack presented. In the ten years that have passed, this opportunism, from the failed "contract wars" in Iraq and Afghanistan (reaping billions for private firms while helping drive the U.S. deeply into debt) to the tapering-off of the patriotic spirit when it no longer served a consumerist agenda, has mostly faded from view. Buried under partisan conflict, which focuses on the liberal / conservative divide, the attention eventually fell on a series of "mistakes" by the Bush administration, mostly overlooking the gutting of the public sector for private profit (brilliantly outlined in Naomi Klein's 2007 book, "The Shock Doctrine"), launched with patriotic fervor in the wake of the September 11 attacks.

When POP Patriotism was first presented at Momenta Art in September 2002, the idea was to witness a momentary rupture which revealed some of the brutal contradictions of "free market" democracy by "freezing" it in the guise of a historical museum. The exhibition was intended as a kind of time capsule, perhaps to be opened at some later date, which might present an opportunity to examine, not through the gauze of memories or reflections, but with artworks and support material that came from the immediacy of moment. In representing the exhibition as faithfully as possible (accounting for a change in venue and the time that has passed) POP Patriotism now has the possibility to function as it was originally intended, as a historical record of an extraordinary period, the repercussions of which are perhaps still not fully understood.

past exhibition

Henry Codax

peter scott — 2011-06-20T19:52:48Z

PICTURE NO PICTURE

peter scott — 2011-04-21T18:24:28Z

No one seems to be sure what the decline of modernism's cultural influence, beginning sometime in the 1950's and 60's, has led to. The return of narrative and ornament in the art and architecture of the 1970's suggested an effort to break with the immediate past, but the privileging of rationalism as a guiding social order evident in the idea of markets finding their perfect equilibrium continues to dominate economic discourse, despite the occasionally irrational results. While architects like Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid, and Rem Koolhaas seemed to have represented "a new way forward," the prevalence of a creeping re-modernism found in the ubiquitous Corbusier-like, double-height urban lofts sheathed in glass and filled with mid-century modern furniture confirms the continued appeal of modernism's aesthetic essentialism.

In art, the early-modern conflict between non-objective painting and representation reached its peak and waned, as the eventual embrace of pluralism paralleled the development of a global, unregulated, free-market economic system. As pluralism was seen to have trumped ideology, the problem of content became increasingly slippery. With the historical determinism of the modernist project now suspect, its inherent iconoclasm began to look puritanical in the context of mass culture's iconophilia. The series of reactions to modernist orthodoxy (Conceptualism, Minimal Art, Pop Art, Appropriation, etc.) broke free of the aesthetic cul de sac of formalism's legacy, but certain aspects of modernist thinking (the primacy of authorship, novelty, the "white cube") have either lingered on or reasserted themselves within the arts.

Acknowledging the confines of discourse while highlighting its means of representation, PICTURE NO PICTURE hopes to raise questions concerning what can be "said," within the context of visual art. While the reductive aesthetic of the modernist art object proposed a set of limits to insure its autonomy and purity, much of the work in this exhibition employs a spare aesthetic that highlights the phenomenological experience of the gallery setting, underlining the significance of the art object's context to its reception.

As consumerism continues to expand, the endless manufacture of image and text produces a kind of baroque static, provoking restlessness rather than comprehension. Connecting through the abstraction of expanding personalized technologies has begun to take precedence over face-to-face exchange, encouraging the development of the subject into what Gordon Matta Clark once referred to as the "passive isolated consumer." In an era of increased physical disorientation afforded by technological short cuts which alter logical sequencing in time and space, the works in PICTURE NO PICTURE reflect on the limits and conditions of the exhibition space (both literally and metaphorically), while emphasizing the viewer's self-awareness as a key aspect in shaping their experience of a work of art.

image: Olivier Mosset, Untitled, 1996, Acrylic on canvas 24" x 24 3/8" (61 x 62 cm)

Jef Geys
Woodward Avenue

peter scott — 2011-02-10T21:56:52Z

carriage trade is very pleased to present Woodward Avenue by Jef Geys, a project first developed and exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit. This exhibition is a variation of Geys' Quadra Medicinale, at the Belgian Pavilion of the 53rd Venice Biennale, a collaboration of four of the artist's friends who collected and archived “urban flora” in Brussels, Moscow, Villeurbanne, and New York. For Woodward Avenue, Geys asked the ethnobotanist Ina Vandebroek to collect weeds found on 12 intersections along a thirty-mile stretch of Detroit's main thoroughfare and document their properties (medicinal, poisonous, etc.). The results were collated into a multi-layered project which incorporates photographs, text, maps, and dried plant specimens, and is accompanied by a film of Vandebroek's 2009 workshop in Bolivia, which brought together indigenous healers from the rainforest and biomedical healthcare providers from Universidad Mayor de San Simón.

As an American city that experienced both the growth promised by the Fordist model and its gradual erosion in the global free-market system, Detroit is often associated with ruin and refashioned as myth. When government and business have “no answer” for economic insolvency, culture occasionally revels in it, offering patina as a salve for social malaise. With a refreshingly sharp wit and keen awareness of the interconnectedness of the ever-present and the overlooked, Geys' Woodward Avenue presents an idiosyncratic approach to urbanism, offering a precise archive of his subject that resists the obvious sociologies that often dictate our impressions of the city.

Part testament to the resilience of the natural world in the face of indifference and neglect, and part conceptual investigation into the complex interplay between evidence and site, Geys' examination of Detroit's main boulevard was organized and directed from his hometown in Balen, Belgium. Mapping the length of Detroit's Woodward Avenue, which stretches across the “natural” divides of socio-economic zones from Cadillac Square in the city's center to neighboring Pontiac, the artist combined the precision of a land surveyor with an organized conceptual model that involved a great deal of chance. Specific intersections were chosen by Geys and visited by Vandebroek, who took photographs and gathered field specimens. The evidence is presented as 12 framed works, which incorporate the actual organic matter of the plants as well as their photographic representation and precise geographic location.

Operating across conventional boundaries that often limit discourse within the social, the political, and the aesthetic, Jef Geys' Woodward Avenue is guided by an intellectual curiosity that incorporates collaboration and community, with a distinct conceptual method grounded by the unambiguous reality of plant life. Linking two seemingly different places in Bolivia and Detroit, the films included in the exhibition were made by Vandebroek during her workshop and edited with detached precision by Geys. Revealing sensitivity to the utility of indigenous plants among traditional healers which occasionally contrasts with the biomedical healthcare providers conventional practice, the films broaden the scope of the exhibition geographically, while underlining the persistent gaps in the promise of modernity routinely filled by the perennial resourcefulness of those on its margins.

carriage trade wishes to thank Jef Geys for the loan of his work for this exhibition, Ina Vandebroek for her advice on realizing the show at carriage trade, and Director and Chief Curator, Luis Croquer of the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit for his important role in the organization and production of Woodward Avenue.

Social Photography

peter scott — 2010-12-20T04:22:07Z

Organized to benefit upcoming programming at carriage trade, Social Photography is an exhibition focusing on the relatively new medium of cell phone photography. As cell phone cameras become more ubiquitous, their function continues to evolve. Encompassing the varied roles of snapshots, visual notes, discrete picture taking, or the immediacy of citizen journalism, the cell phone camera lacks the intentionality of a point-and-shoot, resulting in a more direct recording of the “everyday.” Because of the proximity of cell phone images to the spoken word and text-based communication, the pictures are often a kind of visual shorthand to fill the gaps in between. Emphasizing no particular theme beyond how the cell phone camera is most often used, both artists and non-artists were invited to submit cell phone images of their choice via email to carriage trade, which the gallery printed on 5" x 7" paper.

Those interested in acquiring any of the photographs from the Social Photography exhibition should please contact the gallery, pscott carriagetrade.org. Photographs can purchased after February 5, 2011, for 75 dollars each (subject to availability).

Another Green World

peter scott — 2010-09-10T17:20:41Z

The exhibition Another Green World intends to draw parallels between the genre of landscape and the current preoccupation with "green" in popular culture. While the romanticism of 19th century landscape tradition linked the sublimity of nature with the existence of God, it also lent inspiration for westward expansion and the underlying impulse of "man's" dominion over nature. This mixture of the profound with the pragmatic speaks to a fundamental contradiction in society's relationship to nature, as the unchecked use of natural resources clashes with the idyllic image of nature as a world "set apart" and untouched by daily life. The commercial appropriation of green imagery is the most recent manifestation of this contradiction, as "greenwashing" facilitates the smoothing over of a conflict that most likely originates in the landscape tradition itself, where the goal of depicting the sublime beauty of the land was at times directly connected to its ultimate exploitation and control.

The heightened realism and precisely articulated imagery of the Hudson River School painters Albert Bierstadt and Frederick Church was motivated by their belief in the existence of a "perfect being" responsible for the mountains, rivers, and falls that were their subjects. Overwhelming the spectator with oversized paintings that implicitly claimed possession of the “view” on their behalf, their spectacular naturalism inspired a combination of fear and awe for the wonders of nature, attracting crowds wowed by their technical virtuosity. The dramatically idealized views of nature produced by some artists and photographers of the period for government surveys and the railroads provided inspiration for the nationalist agenda of Manifest Destiny, with little visual evidence of its attendant brutality. Encouraging reverence toward a natural world eventually “put to use” for material gain, the legacy of American landscape painting is accompanied by some ambivalence, with parallels to today's “greening” of consumerism, where nature is invoked as a means of “cleansing” industrial products of their environmentally questionable origins.

Although the romantic character of the landscape tradition would eventually be channeled into modernist abstraction, the benevolence associated with naturalism has remained, often serving as a means of neutralizing conflicts of landscape and place. "Green" is now identified with anything from new technologies to luxury condos and deodorant, its indiscriminate use serving as a fairly clear a sign of its ideological import. As our conflicted interaction with nature reveals itself through "breakdowns" in weather patterns and resource-associated disasters that temporarily grab headlines in the daily news, the view of the natural world as simultaneously “good,” wondrous, and exploitable belies a growing awareness of potentially ominous environmental scenarios. Presenting artwork that engages the landscape tradition to varying degrees, the exhibition Another Green World represents an effort to explore these contradictory impulses and their underlying conflicts, which are now frequently veiled under a thin veneer of green.

Mistaken Identity

peter scott — 2010-04-26T19:10:15Z

While the genre of portraiture tends to feature clearly defined subjects, the portrait show Mistaken Identity focuses instead on the uncertainties of facial recognition and how misperception might affect behavior in everyday experience. Linking the concept of belief to what we can “know” about an individual's face, the exhibition explores identification as a process influenced by the particular circumstances of any given encounter.

Commonly associated with detective stories and courtroom dramas, the need of proof of an individual's identity also has a utilitarian aspect, as our memories for faces plays a significant role in the most mundane of exchanges. In the somewhat rare case of people with prosopagnosia (face blindness), friends and family are indistinguishable from strangers, so that the “context” of an individual (hair, clothing, the sound of a voice) often provides the only clues to their identity. For an eyewitness or victim of a crime, these same associations can prove misleading, as they may falsely trigger a link to an innocent person who has chance connections to a perpetrator's appearance.

The case of imposters provides yet another example of a loss of identity through context, but here the subject willingly foregoes recognition in favor of subterfuge. When exposed, the temporary forfeiture of an identity is often met with a great deal of hostility. Those fooled by the deception are now faced with the uncertainty of their convictions. This need for authentication in connection with facial identification runs deep, as it underlines the survival mechanisms that guide our perceptions of whom and what we can trust.

Approaching portraiture as a means to explore the complex relationship between perception and circumstance, the work in the exhibition Mistaken Identity presents a range of possibilities concerning the construction of belief in the process of fixing an individual's identity.

The Innocence Project is affiliated with Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University

catalogue available
more on the artists

carriage trade benefit

peter scott — 2010-03-29T14:44:51Z

carriage trade is re-opening as a non-profit at 62 Walker Street (near Broadway) with a benefit to raise funds for its upcoming programming. The artwork can be previewed from 2-6 pm Wednesday, April 14 - Saturday, April 17, the day of the raffle event. Tickets for the raffle are $125 and can be purchased through paypal and in the gallery the week of the benefit. The number of tickets sold will equal the number of donated works. On the night of the raffle, ticket holders are entitled to choose an artwork once their numbers have been randomly drawn. The artworks will be presented anonymously, with the identity of the artist revealed only after the ticket holder acquires the piece.

Ricci Albenda
Graham Anderson
Michael Ashkin
David Baskin
Betty Beaumont
Martin Beck
Dike Blair
Barbara Bloom
Christina Cahill
Antoine Catala
Barbara Ess
Rochelle Feinstein
Liselot van de Heijden
Eric Heist
Ed Hemingway
Shirley Irons
Carol Irving
Paul Ramirez Jonas
Jennifer Karady
Tom Kotik
Tom Kovachevich
Ligorano/Reese

Pam Lins
John Miller
Filip Noterdaeme
R.H. Quaytman
Walter Robinson
Ron Rocheleau
Aura Rosenberg
Zoe Sheehan Saldana
David Schafer
Julia Scher
Trevor Shimizu
Heidi Schlatter
Ryan Schroeder
Dennis Sears
Mark Sengbusch
Mike Smith
Seton Smith
Colin Thomson
Julia Wachtel
Lindsay Walt
Oliver Wasow

Raffle Tickets are $125, every ticket purchase will guarantee one artwork and 2 complementary drink tickets.

carriage trade wishes to thank all the artists for generously donating their work, Dan Graham for his continued support of this project, board members Andrea Blum, Anya von Gosseln, and Ken Saylor, and benefit assistance from David Baskin and Carol Irving.

Market Forces

peter scott — 2009-02-03T00:08:21Z

Market Forces, Part 1/ Consuming Territories, and Market Forces, Part 2/Consumer Confidence, were first presented at carriage trade in New York in the winter and spring of 2008, and will be shown together at Galerie Erna Hecey in Brussels in May 2009. A short excerpt from the original press release appears below:

Market Forces addresses the euphoric consumer culture of the last decade that manifested itself in a seeming overflow of goods and services and an explosion of luxury housing development that now dominates the urban landscape. The term is derived from laissez-faire economic theory and refers to a hands-off approach to the ʻnatural orderʼ of supply and demand. Used in this context, it is meant to invoke skepticism concerning the almost religious belief in, and militant protection of, our god-given right to consume. This two-part exhibition is intended to be as inclusive as the market is pervasive, with work that addresses the influence of consumerism on personality, labor, politics, and the built environment.

First developed as a text in late 2007, the concept for Market Forces was, in part, a response to the overwhelming dominance of the neo-liberal economic model on social and cultural conditions in the U.S. and abroad. As the housing and consumer bubble grew to historic proportions, the American media repeatedly endorsed the notion of limitless economic expansion. Any doubts about the risks of bundling fraudulent housing loans and tossing them into the global financial stream for short term gains or to question the amount of debt consumers could hold were seen as ʻspoiling the partyʼ and were rarely expressed on prime-time TV. Anchors on financial news shows functioned as cheerleaders for the boom, smugly nodding their heads up and down with every rise in housing prices or the Dow. Dozens of housing related reality shows appeared on cable TV with names like ʻFlip This Houseʼ, featuring opportunistic contractors who ʻspruced upʼ homes of marginal character and doubled the price for the next in line to cash in on skyrocketing prices before the music stopped.

Meanwhile, urban communities across the country were being uprooted by rampant speculation, as real estate developers offered lifelong residents piles of money to ʻcash outʼ, tearing down their houses and replacing them with ersatz modernist ʻluxuryʼ condos. Many who stayed took out risky but instantly lucrative mortgages, which lead to purchases of SUVʼs and whatever could be stuffed into them. Every year of the boom offered a new round of Christmas-time mayhem, as consumers fought for their right to shop. As shopping mall doors opened in the early morning hours of Black Friday, those shoppers unfortunate enough to stumble through first were occasionally trampled in the mad rush to be the first to get a deal on the newest Xbox.

The original presentation of Market Forces examined the decade long economic boom in what, in retrospect, appears to have been the moment of its peak. Linking the built environment and commodity culture, which too often had been seen as separate phenomena, these exhibitions focused on the social and psychological effects on a society enthralled with the consumerist ethos, a state of mind that is as short on memory as it is long on optimism. With constant media reports of a global economy stuck in reverse, the ʻpanic of 09ʼ threatens to displace the origins of a crisis which brought the ʻthreatʼ of nationalization to the U.S., where government intervention in business affairs was once considered heresy. Given the reluctance of societies in the midst of market euphoria to entertain skeptical views, perhaps this is now the moment to reflect on the social aspects of economic relations often overlooked during the decade-long boom.

more on the artists
Market Forces, Part 1 and 2 catalog
catalog essay