Look Who it Was Random video

MIKE WEISS GALLERY - Michael Zelehoski

715 views · Published 9 May 2015 · 7:19 · Indexed 30 October 2026

Channel: NYC GALLERY OPENINGS · 2015 · Entertainment

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NYC GALLERY OPENING - http://nycgalleryopenings.com

Mike Weiss Gallery is pleased to present 
New Order, the first solo exhibition by 
Michael Zelehoski with the gallery. 
Zelehoski takes found three-dimensional 
objects like pallets and police barricades 
and restructures them into two-
dimensional space. The resulting works 
are not mirrors of the objects but instead 
examine and challenge the selective 
process of human perception in its most 
abstract and creative tendencies. By 
working somewhere in between the 
separate domains of sculpture’s core 
dimensionality and painting’s historical 
flatness, Zelehoski’s work also mixes in 
the formalist ethos of emphasizing 
composition. The exhaustive process of 
metamorphosis in Zelehoski’s work 
fluidly moves between fully-formed 
objects and binary abstraction, pursuing 
the possibilities and intricacies of 
perception.

The carefully engineered distortions in 
Zelehoski’s work give the original objects 
a significance beyond their humble 
backgrounds. Even after he restructures 
the object into its new iteration, it still 
bears the unique scars of time. The only 
linear narrative present in New Order is 
relayed by the power of the details in the 
objects and their secret, rich histories 
evident in the unaltered surface qualities 
that Zelehoski intentionally reveals and 
celebrates. New Order contains works 
made out of materials found in places 
along the East Coast, all chosen for their 
untapped potential. Prominently 
featured in the exhibition is an electrical 
tower collapsed in purposeful angles, 
antithetical to what we know about 
electrical towers. The new formation 
becomes an abstract composition 
engineered to provide a different 
perspective outside of what our brains 
immediately infer. Components of reality, 
like wires running off the tower 
mimicking our real-time perspective, help 
us quantify what’s in front of us.

The exhibition also features work that 
bisects the picture plane, moving from 
the flat plane of the wall to protruding 
into our individual space. Other works 
tower over the viewer in precarious 
assemblages that seem to defy gravity 
while stuck in an impossibly frozen 
moment of collapse or formation. 
Rehabilitation, reincarnation, and 
transformation run through the entirety 
of Zelehoski’s oeuvre. Besides the 
obvious process of reconstitution of 
found objects, the work also examines 
what happens when an unpretentious 
object from reality is reappraised and 
injected with aesthetic implication. 

Michael Zelehoski lives and works in 
Beacon, NY. His last solo exhibition in 
New York was with Dodge Gallery. The 
Pompidou in Paris recently acquired 
Open House (2012), his largest work to 
date.

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