Connor Stankard
Stirring in the Mantle
October 1 - October 23, 2016

Reception:
Saturday, October 1
7-10pm

Stankard's paintings exert a gravitational pull toward the center of the earth over floating objects that resist both grounding and reason. Microcosms of images swim across the work’s surface, creating spaces where causal relations no longer hold.

For this exhibition, Stankard displays six paintings that work in direct dialogue with each other. Figures begun in one painting are finished in the next, forms mirror one another from across the room, and, as within the drawers and shelves of a wunderkammer, objects appear to have been borrowed from the detritus of scientific and anthropological findings. She underscores the disruption of these objects with measured precision and a patient handling of paint.

The paintings depict moments of deep perspective, penetrating what otherwise would remain abstract space. Like a stage setting, figural elements hang from an imaginary backing, without visible means of support, while others agitate the invisible front wall of the picture plane.

The work depicts the careful composition of coded mementos arranged in negative space. Stankard displaces constructed images of feminine identity, associated with the pride and futility of vanity, with absurd objects that reconstruct the scene into a larger exploration of a consumerist life. Her paintings trigger a gastronomic desire to digest these objects as products of a commodity culture that incites mass consumption. The paintings vibrate between quiet attraction and noisy repulsion, producing a world in which the human form operates as a porous and permeable object of desire.

Stirring in the mantle of the earth or below your fireplace, there is a distant and chaotic churning.

Connor Stankard (b. 1992) lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Stankard received her BFA from Pace University in 2015. Recent group exhibitions include Logic Frog (Allen & Eldridge, New York, NY, 2016), Show No. 1 (6 Month Space, New York, NY, 2016), Mush Fake (WUHO Gallery, Los Angeles, CA, 2015), A Synthetic Wound (41 Cooper Square Gallery, New York, NY, 2015) and Strangers Forming a Group Waiting to Kiss (Motel Gallery, Brooklyn NY, 2015).