Miko + Thayer

DAVE MIKO + TOM THAYER Baseless Legion of Architects Rent Asunder February 17 – March 17, 2013

Eleven Rivington is thrilled to present new collaborative works by NY artists Dave Miko & Tom Thayer, on view at the gallery’s 195 Chrystie location from February 17 through March 17, 2013. Their first exhibition with Eleven Rivington is titled Baseless Legion of Architects Rent Asunder and comprises six new video projections onto painted aluminum panels. At 11 Rivington Street is an installation by the artists with 15 collaborators, created in one afternoon based on the titles of the six projections at 195 Chrystie Street.

The team of Dave Miko & Tom Thayer debuted their hybrid process at The Kitchen in 2011, titled New World Pig. Their practice consists of collaboratively worked animations that are projected onto paintings on aluminum. Both artists also maintain respective solo careers - Miko was featured in Greater New York at MoMA PS1 in 2010 and Thayer was included in the 2012 Whitney Biennial. This new series presents a progression of their work towards more ambitious scale and pictorially experimental territory. 

Using mutually culled imagery as a point of departure, Dave Miko & Tom Thayer develop their work through an ongoing visual dialogue. Motifs from Thayer’s heavily processed, vivid animations carry over onto—and sometimes derive from—the surfaces of Miko’s mixed media paintings. Their newest work revolves around the movement of various beings through physical space, oscillating between the external appearance of objects and an internal visual cogitation. Portal imagery (windows, doors, frames) fuse with faces and masks, architecture and nature as figures travel from one type of space to the next. They use a breadth of painting materials aimed at blurring the boundary between projected and painted image. The colored light of the projected animation reacts differently to each specific surface, be it oil, chalk, enamel, fluorescent colors, spray paint, or raw metal. The works are conceived and developed over months through a back-and-forth dialogue about changes in narrative structure and tone, fine-tuning the relationship between Miko’s unorthodox painting style and Thayer’s use of analog video effects. The result is a beautifully tenuous installation; an expansive and experimental incarnation of painting that unifies two seemingly exclusive media.

Dave Miko was born in 1974 in Shelton, CT and educated at Yale and SUNY Purchase. His solo exhibitions include Real Fine Arts, Brooklyn; Parisa Kind, Frankfurt; and Wallspace, NY. Tom Thayer was born 1970 in Chicago Heights, IL and educated at Northern Illinois University. Thayer’s solos include Derek Eller, NY and Tracy Williams, LTD, NY.

The invited collaborators for the 11 Rivington installation are: Yuji Agematsu, Jenny Borland, Whitney Clafin, Bill Hayden, Matt Hoyt, John Jines, Andrei Koschmieder, Ben Morgan-Cleveland, Annie Ochmanek, Ben Phelan, Sam Pulitzer, Colleen Rochette, Joanna Spinks, Annette Weintraub, and Bo Wilsdorf.