Friday, November 10, 2023 — Friday, December 22, 2023
Nancy Shaver, Maximilian Goldfarb, Gret Sterrett Smith, Pradeep Dalal, David Levi Strauss, George Liu, Lisa Scull with Lisa Robertson, Jean-Philippe Antoine, Jenny Snider, Natalie Hayes, Lucas Cook, Maya Strauss, Charles Goldman, Ken Landauer, Kevin Larmon, Marley Strodl
The international artist's collective WOLF is currently researching and preparing a new, site-specific installation entitled Erie County.
WOLF is a collective of artists that has been creating site-specific and densely constructed installations since 2019. Its current configuration includes Nancy Shaver, Maximilian Goldfarb, Gret Sterrett Smith, Pradeep Dalal, and David Levi Strauss, with the new additions of Lisa Scull and George Liu.
WOLF engages many oppositional categories, including: the vernacular and the standardized, the anonymous and the named, the handmade and the mass produced, the many and the individual, difference and recurrence, text and texture, fast and slow, trash and treasure. Wolf builds installations to explore material histories.
As the poet Ann Lauterbach, a contributor to the Wolf Tones book, states, "The whole vista cannot be steadied into any formula for seeing, not only because of the sheer disjunction of objects, but because each incident of seeing seems to require a new consideration, a recalibration of the total experience."
The writer David Levi Strauss has said: "The collaborative group WOLF has found a way to work with and through the unavoidable dissonance or noise of collaboration, as well as the tremendous cacophonous din being produced by the culture at large at this time in America, to get to clear signal and an original tone—their own sound. It does not deny or suppress dissonance, but works through it—kindly, conscientiously, with patience, persistence, and an exceedingly rare amount of trust."
Nancy Shaver is an artist who has been exhibiting work for more than 40 years. In 2018, she was included in Outliers and American Vanguard Art (National Gallery, Washington, D.C.), and One Day at a Time: Manny Farber and Termite Art (MOCA, Los Angeles). Other recent exhibitions include VIVA ARTE VIVA (La Biennale di Venezia, 2017); Nancy Shaver: Reconciliation (The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, 2015); and Robert Gober: The Heart is Not a Metaphor (Museum of Modern Art, 2014–15). Recent gallery exhibitions include Derek Eller Gallery (NYC), 12.26 (Dallas, TX), Atlanta Contemporary (GA), and Parker Gallery (Los Angeles). Shaver has received fellowships and awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, Anonymous Was a Woman, the Pollock Krasner Foundation, and the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation. A co-founder of Incident Report in Hudson, NY, Shaver also runs the store, Henry. She has been teaching in the Bard College MFA Program for more than 20 years.
David Levi Strauss is the author of numerous books, including Co-illusion: Dispatches from the End of Communication (MIT Press, 2020), Photography and Belief (David Zwirner Books, ekphrasis series, 2020), From Head to Hand: Art and the Manual (Oxford University Press, 2010), and Between the Eyes: Essays on Photography and Politics, with an introduction by John Berger (Aperture 2003; new edition, 2012). In Case Something Different Happens in the Future: Joseph Beuys and 9/11 was published by Documenta 13 (2012); and he co-edited, with Michael Taussig, Peter Lamborn Wilson, and Dilar Dirik, To Dare Imagining: Rojava Revolution (Autonomedia, 2016; Italian edition by Elèuthera, Milan, 2017). Recently, Strauss, Taussig, and Wilson also co-edited The Critique of the Image Is the Defense of the Imagination (Autonomedia, 2020). Strauss was a Guggenheim fellow in 2003 and received the Infinity Award for Writing from the International Center of Photography in 2007. He is chair emeritus of the graduate program in Art Writing at the School of Visual Arts in New York, which he directed from 2007 to 2021.
Gret STERRETT SMITH studied painting at Goddard College with Jim Gahagan, an American colorist who had directed the Hans Hofmann School in New York. She graduated from the San Francisco Art Institute with a BFA in painting in 1980, where she studied with Hassel Smith, Franklin Williams, Robert Hudson, and Angela Davis. She also studied in San Francisco with Helen Palmer, Diane di Prima, Ian Grand, and Charles Ponce in the training of the intuition, the Kabbalah, and Somatic Knowledge. She was part of the group of artists and poets that were part of Jess and Robert Duncan’s household and Diane di Prima’s circle. She has been painting and making sculptures ever since.
Maximilian Goldfarb is an artist who produces projects in many forms. Goldfarb has completed past works with support from the Harpo Foundation, the Elizabeth Graham Foundation, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, The Kaplan Institute, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts and the Experimental Television Center. He has participated in numerous exhibitions in venues including Sculpture Center, NY; Stadsgalerij, NL; Western Front, BC; White Columns, NY; The Drawing Center, NY; and Nina Freudenheim Gallery, Buffalo, NY. Goldfarb is interested in the generative potential of publication and radio transmission platforms. He is co-author of Architectural Inventions (Laurence King Publishing, UK, 2012), Deep Cycle (M49, 2010), Handbook for Human Machines (Pilot Editions, 2015), and Remote Viewing: 500 Tableaux (Publication Studio, 2017). Goldfarb is a co-founder of Incident Report in Hudson, NY. He is an Assistant Professor of Sculpture in the Department of Art at the University at Buffalo.
Pradeep Dalal is a Mumbai-born artist and writer based in New York. His work has been shown at EFA Project Space, New York (2019); Callicoon Fine Arts, New York (2017); Sala Diaz, San Antonio, Texas (2017); and Murray Guy, New York (2011); among other venues. His photographs have been included in publications such as Blind Spot, BOMB, Cabinet, Grey Room, Nueva Luz, and Rethinking Marxism. His artist book, Bhopal, MP (2017), was excerpted in Chandigarh Is in India (The Shoestring Publisher, 2016); and his essay, “A Bifocal Frame of Reference,” was published in Western Artists and India: Creative Inspirations in Art and Design (Thames & Hudson, 2013). He recently published Photography in the Sensorium with Fia Backström for the Pratt Photography Imprint (2021). He co-chaired the Photography Department in the MFA program at Bard College, Annandale-on- Hudson, New York, from 2015 to 2020. He has also taught at Pratt Institute, Cooper Union, and the International Center of Photography. He directs the Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant in New York.
Lisa Scull is a designer of woven textiles with a strong focus on structural and material developments and innovations. Scull works on Jacquard looms and 24-harness Dobby looms. She is particularly interested in investigating and revealing how overlapping systems of woven structure, pattern and color can interact with the physical properties of material to bring about precise relationships between ordered regularity and infinite variety, often resulting in perplexing phenomena and experiences of light, shadow, color, dimensionality and texture. Scull has taught in the Textiles department at RISD and designing textile collections for the field of interiors as an independent designer and consultant for the past 32 years.
George Liu is an artist who works with crochet and lives in Hudson, NY.
Lucas Cook is an artist currently residing in Buffalo, NY. Photography guides his practice, though he frequently utilizes sculpture, installation, and radio transmission. Recurring factors include geography, site specificity, and found object reclamation. He graduated with a BFA from University at Buffalo in 2021 and is an inaugural member of BICA School, a free alternative art school.
Nat Hayes is an artist based in Buffalo, originally from the Hudson Valley. At present, she is engaged in two overlapping practices: surface/skin investigation and debris/magic accumulation. She studied poetry at SUNY at Geneseo and art at SUNY at Buffalo. She is, for now, a forever student at BICA School.