CHRISTOPHER CHIAPPA
It’s Much Worse Than You Think
April 27 through June 1, 2002
Fredericks Freiser Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of new work by Christopher Chiappa. This will be the artist’s third one-person exhibition in New York. In the past year, Mr. Chiappa has been included in group exhibitions at Exit Art, NY; James Cohen Gallery, NY; and Modern Art Inc., UK.
Christopher Chiappa’s photography and sculpture have become well-known for juxtaposing issues of the heroic and sacred with the pathetic limitations of our everyday existence. Whether it is in a reference to artistic bravado or in the icons of American life, Chiappa serves up an odd blend of the monumental and the debased, the intimate and the destructive.
In Chiappa’s many self-portraits, he puts himself in less than flattering positions. Sitting Duck is a self portrait as a wooden duck decoy. In this piece, Chiappa has enlisted the services of an esteemed decoy carver to reduce the artist to the size of a duck and elongate his Roman nose into a beak. In Big Asshole, a large-scale face of the artist is rendered in a matrix of small dots. Here, each dot is a perfect tiny asshole cut-out from a magazine.
Other pieces like Shower and Room with a View flesh out the way that things can go wrong. We have grown accustomed to seeing real-life objects in a gallery space that are not as they seem, but Chiappa offers us a something different-- everything is as it seems, though not at all comforting. In dealing with the desire for the miraculous, Chiappa puts on his Sunday best, sweeps the crumbs under the rug, and gives us his most sincere smile.
Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 11am to 6pm. For further information and/or photographs please contact the gallery by telephone at (212) 633-6555, fax at (212) 367-9502, or e-mail at fredericksgal@mindspring.com.