BACKSTORY UNIVERSE
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BACKSTORY UNIVERSE •
BACKSTORY UNIVERSE
A KIPNZ GROUP EXHIBITION AT DIANA
PAINTINGS BY RHYS ZIEMBA, SCULPTURES BY PAUL LATISLAW, DRAWINGS BY ANNIE HAYES
JULY 11TH - AUGUST 2ND
127 HENRY STREET, NEW YORK, NY. 10002
Hours: Tuesdays - Fridays 12-6PM and by appointment
KIPNZ is pleased to present Backstory Universe, an exhibition of work by Rhys Ziemba, Paul Latislaw and Annie Hayes. Each artist works in highly distinct visual languages: Ziemba, troubling the conventions of representation in oil paint, Latislaw in highly narrative felted Merino wool sculpture, and Hayes in abstract forms and composition in luminous drawings. Within their own set of invented visual codes, each artist shares an acuity for detail and execution that convincingly establishes a sharp and perceptible “world” of each artwork and artist.
Top of page: The Flight to Varennes, 2021. Oil on panel. 36 x 60 inches. Rhys Ziemba. (Learn more about this work here.)
Above: Concussion Shed, 2024. Oil on panel. 30 x 24 inches. Rhys Ziemba.
As part of his practice, Rhys Ziemba assembles diorama-like scenes in his basement studio—composed of everyday objects such as mannequin parts, clothing, traffic cones, tupperware bins, garbage, skeleton forms and plastic cups—and renders them faithfully in oil paint. This dark theater of discarded ephemera has recently begun to populate vivid landscapes, sometimes urban, where the artist lives, but also natural environments including the beaches and deep horizons of Florida, where he grew up. “There’s a wonderful image I first got in my head when I read Caetano Veloso’s book, Tropical Truth, many years ago: culture itself as a big trash heap with layers and layers of junk piled on top of each other, intermingling, stuff staining other stuff, bits poking out, all of it determining the topography for everything deposited later. It’s like a metaphor that describes itself. I’d like to dissolve the distinction between the thing being rendered and the rendering. The act of littering in the world and ‘littering’ oil paint on a painting become the same thing.”
First: Bar Fight: Scene III, 2021/2024. Felted wool. 32 x 26 x 27 inches; Second: Something About Everything, 2023. Felted wool. 29 x 9 x 7 inches; Third: Bar Fight: Scene I, 2021/2024. Felted wool. 42 x 12 x 12 inches.
All: Paul Latislaw
Inspired by the theatrical stage sets, exaggerated characters of early stop-motion animation, and the strange 1913 children’s story Pollyanna by Elanor H. Porter, Paul Latislaw’s works are infused with both sweetness and its shadow. Cartoonishly rounded figures with impishly bulbous features populate Latislaw’s sculptures, setting the stage for a playful tension of the innocent and the slightly deranged. Laboriously transforming needle felted wool into richly animated sculptures, Latislaw presents us with the denizens of invented narratives, a process he terms “neurotic story-building.” A bear in cowboy boots swings a lasso; a rabbit, its leg swallowed by a giant fish, drags a chicken in a choke-hold; a slender dancer with an enigmatic smile seems to twirl on a pedestal. The concrete details of the narrative are not as important to the artist as the formal and creative possibilities each part of a story affords—each arrangement allowing for new associations and imagining. Despite their child-like appearance, each sculpture is meticulously crafted; curved and flowing details revisited and perfected. With their off-white hue perched atop white pedestals, the sculptures allude to traditional marble statuary but are composed of wool—a soft material with working class and craft associations.
MP-2, 2024. Colored pencil on paper. 30 x 22 inches. Annie Hayes.
Annie Hayes is a miner of shapes and forms that were designed for industrial purposes, but are now out of circulation: a shape from a discarded produce box, a flourish from an old book of type and fonts, a schematic of a tractor part from a vintage catalog of farm equipment. These shapes are made into stencils for repeated use, mutating and morphing like cells and small organisms throughout her work. Having amassed a library of shapes and abstract vocabularies, Hayes layers them in ways that allow these orphaned forms find their place in new, thoughtfully considered compositions—well beyond their initial program of industrial efficiency. They are revealed for a second time in highly detailed constellations and their strange and singular beauty is recognized.
KIPNZ was founded in 2022 by Kenneth Pietrobono and Natalie Zayne and is located in the Western Catskills town of Walton, NY.
Rhys Ziemba (born 1981) is a musician and artist. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife Elizabeth LoPiccolo and two cats.
Paul Latislaw was born in Los Angeles, California (1993). He graduated with a BA from Sarah Lawrence College in 2016. He lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
Annie Hayes received her B.F.A. from the University of Iowa. Over the past four decades of her career, she has been featured in dozens of exhibitions in New York and across the country, and has participated in numerous residencies in Colorado, Vermont and Maine. Hayes is a finalist for the NYFA Artist Fellowship (2023) in Printmaking/Drawing/Book Arts, and received a NYSCA/NYFA Artist Support Grant (2022) for the “Maintenance Project” series, among many other distinctions. Hayes lives and works in Delhi, New York, and in SoHo, New York City.
DIANA NEW YORK, a cooperative exhibition space in New York at 127 Henry Street, Chinatown, features rotating exhibitions organized by the founding partners CARBON 12 (Dubai), MACAULAY & Co (Vancouver), and FIERMAN (New York) as well as by guest galleries and independent curators. The gallery space itself is a small storefront steeped in the New York history of independent galleries.