Kathryn Markel Fine Arts is pleased to present Jitterbug Waltz, a collection of shaped and sewn paintings by Brooklyn based artist Zuriel Waters. The exhibition will take place at the gallery’s 179 10th Avenue location and will run from May 9th - June 15th, 2024. An opening reception will take place on 5/9 from 6-8pm.
This body of work spans over 2 years and is constructed entirely from sewn fabric and acrylic paint. There is no wooden armature and they are very flat. Small dress pins hold the work to the wall via eye hooks which are sewn into the topstitch on the reverse side. To accommodate for the artist's studio environment the works are engineered to fold-up for storage, each iteration carefully planned to fit inside a box which holds about a year's worth of finished pieces. They are designed to give a maximum amount of wallspace with a minimum amount of storage.
Each piece is created one-after-the-other, never simultaneously, in an iterative process which retains traces of time of year as well as the artist’s temporal psychological condition. Because they are so rooted in seasonality they can be thought of as a form of fashion design, trawling the artist's neighborhood for color information from daily walks. In this way, the work also participates in a constructivist reduction of the urban environment, a kind of futurist landscape painting.
In the artist’s own words, “…the work has been referred to as ‘bugs’, borrowing from Starship Troopers vernacular for aliens (but also in the sense that anything can be a bug, a bugger, a cute term of endearment) or as butterflies suspended in a state of perpetual metamorphoses. But this is just a convenience, a way of hinting at their figurativeness, their “being-ness” because they are in fact aliens from the 2nd dimension, an invasive species of ‘flatlanders’ who occupy wall space and transform it into something more dynamic and spectral. It is my ambition to create an art which adds value to people’s lives, like a kind of Roomba-esque automaton, a “machine-for-living” designed to help rid a house of the despair caused by pallid, static walls."
“Jitterbug Waltz” pays tribute to this interpretation while incorporating the artist’s love of music (himself also a lifelong player of woodwind instruments). Written by pianist Fats Waller in 1942, the song features a descending line composed of two-note melodic phrases that tumble one after the other like a slow-motion somersault down the stairs, incessantly pointing back up even as the next continues to fall. This kind of comic resilience forms the emotional context of the show “… like a buoy on the ocean that just doesn’t seem to know how to not keep bobbing back up, the waves keep coming in one after the other but some universal force just keeps pulling it back to the surface…”
