With a name straight out of the “chill wave band name generator,” New York art collective/gallery/residency Still House has been cropping up in New York (an abandoned Department of Transportation office), Miami (during Art Basel) and the pages of T, the New York Times style magazine, over the past few years. The group was founded by Isaac Brest and Alex Perweiler in 2007 and now includes nine additional members—all young artists in their mid-20s—plus a rotating cast of collaborators and temporary in-house residents.
Next Thursday their self-curated show, “Here Comes,” opens at an exhibition space opened by Mark Fletcher on Washington Square North. The private art dealer and advisor saw Still House’s first show at 7Eleven gallery (a nomadic gallery using vacant New York real estate) in the summer of 2008.
Last spring the crew moved into an empty floor of a Red Hook warehouse and spent a couple of months renovating it themselves. They’ve been working out of the new space for about a year, and most of the work in “Here Comes” was produced there.
“Our studio practice is pretty open,” Brest told A.i.A. “We each have our own space, but there’s a free-flowing collaboration that happens. People are involved from when you think of your idea to when you exhibit it. So throughout the process of making work there’s a lot of cross-pollination.” This long-running collaborative atmosphere made organizing a group show of their work natural. As Brest puts it, “The work inherently has this bond based on the fact that it was all cooked in the same oven. The curating happens more in the production than in the selection and hanging.”
The only participant who is not a regular Still House member is Alex Da Corte, who is showing a new triptych of shampoo paintings on mirror. Da Corte has shown with the group for a couple of years, and was included in one of their Department of Transportation exhibitions.
Works by regular Still House-ers include Brendan Lynch’s pounded aluminum leaf and graphite on wood panels; Louis Eisner’s photorealistic oil paintings of mass-produced playground slides; Alex Perweiler’s nearly monochrome photographic prints he creates in a darkroom, without a camera; and Dylan Lynch’s delicately balanced sculptures made up of materials found in hardware and sporting goods stores.
With the opening just a week away, Still House hasn’t yet quite finalized the exhibition checklist. “First we pick the larger works and the ones that are more difficult to curate around, and place those in the space,” says Brest. “But we keep a second arsenal of additional material available, just in case.”