ALWAYS

Alex Kwartler
Sam Roeck
ALWAYS

JDJ | The Ice House
January 5 - March 15, 2020

Alex Kwartler and Sam Roeck have their own art practices.

Kwartler is known for his paintings of everyday images and objects; Roeck, for his drawings of everyday images and objects. Each artist has a catalogue of images compiled over the years that they use as source material for their respective work.

The centerpiece of this exhibition is a moving-image projection titled ALWAYS. It is their first collaboration together, or with anyone. Two slide projectors, one rotating clockwise and the other counterclockwise, project images that travel slowly across the gallery walls and intermittently overlap. One slide carousel contains images created by Kwartler from his archive, and the other contains images from Roeck’s, each artist giving the other, and the audience, a view into the storage drawer of their practices. Each artist’s carousel has been recolored in red, green and blue, the primary colors of emitted light. For brief moments the images intersect, creating new colors and a third, fleeting image.

ALWAYS is a metaphor for relationship: the relinquishing of control, the freedom found in parameters, the inevitability of miscommunication and loss, the roles of time and chance, and the necessity of trust.

On view in the gallery’s loft are Kwartler’s recent Snowflake paintings and Roeck’s Inferno drawings.

Alex Kwartler (b. 1979, New York) and Sam Roeck (b. 1985, Chicago) live and work in New York.