NEW YORK, NY.- Foreign & Domestic is now opening Greg Carideo: Dog Eared Reverie, the artist’s first solo exhibition at the gallery. The exhibition showcases eight new wall-mounted sculptures formally reminiscent of commercial awnings, each enclosing a singular rubber shoe heel found on the streets of New York. The exhibition opens on May 13, 2023 at 24 Rutgers Street, and will be on view through June 18.
Each steel armature is handmade by the artist using a metal joining technique known as silver brazing, and outfitted with meticulously sewn fabric compositions. Around the size of a human rib cage, the intimate scale and proportion of each artwork is modeled around the unique shoe sole fragment it shelters within. The tailored fabric collages which envelop each sculpture consist mostly of tattered T-shirts, bleached by exposure to sunlight and perforated with tiny apertures chafed through by repeated contact with the body. Photographs of architectural details – windows, murals, gates, alleyways and alcoves – are stitched into the surfaces of each piece.
Carideo’s new work fuses the language of sculpture, photography, architecture and the readymade into a unique hybrid which evokes the medieval art of reliquaries, intricate containers custom-made for housing body parts and other saintly ephemera.
Collecting – as act and art – is central to Carideo’s work. He cultivates an extensive archive of cellphone photography, visual notes of architectural miscellany, discarded mattresses, commercial awnings, trash-as-sculpture and fleeting sunlight. This is photography as means of transport – a peripatetic practice that tracks some of the artist’s most timeworn routes in New York – chronicling familiar spots as they fray or endure over consecutive years. Other series of cellphone snapshots chronicle, for example, the fences made from recycled mattress springs in Mexico, or Florence’s bucchete di vino – ‘little mouths’ – windows used to sell wine from wealthy villas’ cellars during times of plague. A book indexing the artist’s photographic references, published by the gallery, will be released in conjunction with the exhibition.
In American cartoons the solid black arch of a tunnel in the side of a mountain is a graphic shorthand for the passage into another world, the vanishing point at the end of a long pursuit. A shoe heel displayed upright and ensconced in a recessed niche becomes both sculptural and pictorial. It calls up the false doors of Egyptian tombs or the forced perspective of Borromini’s corridor, architectural illusions that extend literal volume into a space beyond. It was on returning from a cross-country trip hopping freight trains – the mythical black arch in a mountainside remained elusive – that the first shoe heel materialized for Carideo on a New York city sidewalk, and he began to find them everywhere:
“Formally, I see the shoe heels as doorways, portals, archways. Conceptually, I think of those doorways as entry points to considering an individual and their journey. They feel like a photograph in some way, a print on the sidewalk, a step left behind as the rest of the foot walks away, only to be noticed later on. I’ve been collecting them for years without exactly knowing their endpoint. They provide meaning to the day. They connect this world to that: to tunnels, roman archways, spirituality.”
Each sole fragment indicates a divided pair, speaks to a matching heel that traveled further, imparting Carideo’s collection of unattached heels with a sense of loss, longing and incompleteness. Like fingerprints, irises, mattresses or awnings, each shoe heel has a unique signature, a color, design and personal history of wear and tear, that constitutes its identity. Each sole is also a variation on a standard form, determined by the mechanical necessity of tracing the outline of a human heel and absorbing the compressive force of the average human body. The heels collected by Carideo constitute a typology for this design vernacular, excerpting the endless play of similarity and difference, presence and absence left behind by the circulation of bodies through the city.
Carideo nourishes his art on this intimate connection between form and function in the human body and the built environment. The shrine-like constructions in Dog Eared Reverie extend the thinking of his recent commercial awning sculptures by lending them a function, something to do: shelter the solitary heels and constitute a chamber (camera) for their viewing. Carideo has described awnings as “urban cloisters serving as a space to talk, smoke, stand without purpose,” to emphasize the charged social spaces – of shelter, encounter and exchange – enabled under their fabric canopies. His latest work extends the erotic potential of volumes enrobed in fabric by modulating the degree of visibility and accessibility of the shoe heel to the viewer, using curtains, cages, doors, cavities and orifices to entice the viewer to kneel down to look up into the work.
The works in Dog Eared Reverie transmit clearly distinct personalities, yet yearn towards a collective identity, for belonging to a greater body of work. Carideo elevates his archive of idiosyncratic remains into a shared act of seeing, saying and showing: each discarded sole the speaker of one language with many accents.
Greg Carideo (b. 1986 in Minneapolis) lives and works in New York. Recent solo exhibitions include Storefront, FR MoCA, Fall River, MA (2022), and Framework, GRIMM, New York (2021). Selected group exhibitions include Local Objects, International Objects, New York (2023); A Place of One’s Own, Andrea Festa Fine Art, Rome (2022); SIGNS, Foreign & Domestic, New York (2022); That Surface Which We Are, The Catskills, New York (2021); Slow Hand Movements * Gentle Whispers * Water * Salt * Tingles *, Boers- Li Gallery, New York (2019); and Sexting, Kate Werble Gallery, New York (2016). Carideo received a BFA from Minneapolis College of Art & Design, Minneapolis in 2008 and an MFA from New York University in 2015.
