Chris Domenick’s Private Figure, his solo exhibition in the Main Gallery of the Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery, is the extension of his studio practice based out of a former Subway restaurant. Private Figure is composed of framed wall-based works and lamps. Within Domenick’s practice the frame acts as a “suspender” and not a “finisher.” The contents of the frames--drawings, print works, fragments of paper, or found imagery–are often placed inside rather than affixed. Through these combinations of image and object, Domenick sees the works “fulfilling their identity as framed drawings” but also through “some kind of slippage” existing as sculptures. This collapsing of categories extends to other aspects of the presence of Domenick’s work. In graduate school the artist was obsessed with the found object and endeavored to bring that energy into his studio practice. In the artist's words, “Found objects embody the systems they navigated without an author.” These new works fluctuate in their authorship between a kitschy craftsperson and an artist. Some of the objects are found and others seem to embody systems but were handmade in the artist’s studio in Canaan, Connecticut.

Domenick’s work flirts with design—lamps, kitchen islands, and frames are all designed objects of domestic interiors. However it’s almost as if he arrived at a design language through a reverse rhetoric, admitting that art opposes design even if the resultant object might be the same. A key tenet of design, as defined by the artist, is its ability to be instrumentalized towards another purpose. This question of utility is active and squirrely within Domenick’s installation. His lamps, filled with our expectations of use, do light the space around them, casting light on the framed artworks on the wall. As Domenick himself explains, “While this ontological companionship could be framed as the ‘lamp lights the artwork,’ it may be more apt to say that the artwork enables a clearer viewing of the lamp.”

Profile
Chris Domenick is an interdisciplinary artist working in painting, sculpture, drawing, and writing. His work explores the poetics of materiality and craft, often engaged with vernacular forms of architecture, design, and the decorative arts. He utilizes abstraction as a means to examine the semantics of surface, shape, and touch. Domenick received an MFA from Hunter College and has received awards from various institutions including the Shandaken Project, the Sharpe-Walentas Space Program, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, and Recess Activities. Recent projects include Detour: cul de sac at International Waters, Song-shaped Sill at the Al Held Foundation, Flat Moon at Kate Werble Gallery, 5 O D A Y S at MASS MoCA, and Particulate Paper Records of Time in Cabinet Magazine. He has been included in exhibitions at Canada Gallery, the Queens Museum, The Vanity East, MoMA, Essex Flowers, Regina Rex, and Room East, among others.