Greg Carideo: Framework
GRIMM is pleased to announce Framework, a solo exhibition of new sculptures by Greg Carideo.
Over the past year Carideo has focused on commercial awnings and their pictorial surfaces as sculptures. He uses the structure of the awnings as a frame for personal mementos including found objects, pieces of faded clothing, and cellphone images that offer fragmentary glimpses of contemporary urban existence. Carideo sews together striking collages from these materials and stretches the fabric over handmade steel structures. Each of the works establish a connection between New York City’s characteristic storefronts and the body.
For Carideo, the cellphone camera is an extension of the body and the mind. He keeps archives of his old cellphone images and looks through them frequently, reviewing the pictures for small details and impressions that catch his attention. From these files he creates visual compendiums that record the city in flux. Cherished moments and places, snapshots of the urban milieu, communicate the immediacy of the metropolis along with the nostalgia of faded portraits.
Carideo describes the evolution of this series and its concrete everyday subject matter: “[Awnings] are large bulky things. Sometimes flashy, classy, or hideous and they are everywhere in New York City. Awnings can say a lot about a place. Often, they show signs of a vanishing city…Each work in this series is compositionally grounded by an arch and a T-shirt’s collar that rides its curve. A tunnel in one work mirrors a pocket in another, or the simple yet satisfying link between an awning’s curve and the way a person’s shoulders transition to their back. These materials visually intertwine, making it difficult to discern photographic images from imagery found in the the form of sun bleaching or preexisting graphic prints.”
The awnings will be exhibited alongside a parallel series of photo-sculptures, creating a dialogue between two modes of collecting, arranging, and presenting traces of the city. In this parallel series, Carideo photographs discarded mattresses, prints the images on fabric, and fits them over hand-shaped boards. He selects his source imagery for the way that light interacts with the undulating surface and material quality of his subject matter. They dislocate this familiar sight – at once dormant, immobile, and repellant – from the context of the New York City’s streets to become objects on a scale that can be held.
Greg Carideo (b 1986 in Minneapolis, MN, US) lives and works in New York, NY (US). He received his BFA from Minneapolis College of Art & Design, Minneapolis, MN (US) in 2008 and his MFA from New York University, NY (US) in 2015. Carideo is currently a professor in the Studio Art department at New York University. His work has been exhibited at Kate Werble Gallery, New York, NY (US); Boers-Li Gallery, New York, NY (US); Black Ball Projects, Brooklyn, NY (US); 80WSE Gallery, New York, NY (US); Icelandic Arts Center, Reykjavík (IS); Biennial of Americas, Denver, CO (US); MCBA, Minneapolis, MN (US); and Art of This, Minneapolis, MN (US), among others. Carideo has been an artist-in-residence at the Colorado Art Ranch in Salida, CO (US), the SIM Artist Residency and the NES Artist Residency, both in Iceland. He is also a recipient of the Jerome Foundation Fellowship and the Samuel May Rudin Fellowship.