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Kahlil Robert Irving

Streets:Chains:Cocktails

Opening: Friday, September 8, 6–8pm

September 8 – October 29, 2017

A photograph of the main area of the gallery: at right is a square raw platform with 4 ceramic sculptures upon it. On the temporary gallery wall is a wallpaper visualizing a chainlink pattern in black and white. There are also 2 raw wood pedestals with one sculpture on them, respectively.

Installation view, Kahlil Robert Irving, Streets:Chains:Cocktails, Callicoon Fine Arts, New York, NY, 2017

A ceramic sculpture on a raw wood pedestal, with the chainlink fence wallpaper in the background.

Installation view, Kahlil Robert Irving, Streets:Chains:Cocktails, Callicoon Fine Arts, New York, NY, 2017

A photograph of a single raw wood pedestal with a ceramic sculpture upon it. In the background we see a raw wood platform with 4 ceramic sculptures upon it. At left, we see the chainlink fence wallpaper on the gallery's temporary wall.

Installation view, Kahlil Robert Irving, Streets:Chains:Cocktails, Callicoon Fine Arts, New York, NY, 2017

A close up photograph of the ceramic sculpture on a raw wood pedestal at the front of the gallery. A portion of the square raw wood table is visible with 2 sculptures upon it. At left is the chainlink vinyl wallpaper.

Installation view, Kahlil Robert Irving, Streets:Chains:Cocktails, Callicoon Fine Arts, New York, NY, 2017

A photograph providing the view of the gallery from the front window. The square raw table with 4 ceramic sculptures is in the foreground, a single pedestal with a ceramic sculpture is in the midground, and in the background we see a long raw platform with 4 visible sculptures upon it. We also see the chainlink wallpaper on the temporary wall jutting from the right of the photo.

Installation view, Kahlil Robert Irving, Streets:Chains:Cocktails, Callicoon Fine Arts, New York, NY, 2017

A photograph of a raw wood platform holding 4 ceramic sculptures. At left we see an excerpt of the gallery's temporary wall, upon which is mounted a chainlink fence wallpaper.

Installation view, Kahlil Robert Irving, Streets:Chains:Cocktails, Callicoon Fine Arts, New York, NY, 2017

A photograph that partially captures the square raw wood table, and we see 2 ceramic sculptures, blurring together somewhat. There is a single raw wood pedestal in the middle ground, and a long table at left, along the wall. On the long table are 5 sculptures. At right in the middle ground we see the chainlink fence wallpaper on the gallery's temporary wall.

Installation view, Kahlil Robert Irving, Streets:Chains:Cocktails, Callicoon Fine Arts, New York, NY, 2017

A photograph of the chainlink fence wallpaper at right, jutting to the left from the right. There is a raw wood pedestal with a single ceramic sculpture, and a long raw wood platform with a single row of 5 ceramic sculptures.

Installation view, Kahlil Robert Irving, Streets:Chains:Cocktails, Callicoon Fine Arts, New York, NY, 2017

A photograph of the long raw wood platform holding 5 ceramic sculptures, and 2 sculptures on raw wood pedestals (1 each respectively), one in the foreground, one in the background. The chainlink fence wallpaper is visible in the middle ground.

Installation view, Kahlil Robert Irving, Streets:Chains:Cocktails, Callicoon Fine Arts, New York, NY, 2017

A photograph of the long platform holding 5 sculptures. We see a small excerpt of the chainlink fence pattern on the temporary wall, jutting from right to left.

Installation view, Kahlil Robert Irving, Streets:Chains:Cocktails, Callicoon Fine Arts, New York, NY, 2017

A photograph of the long raw wooden table with 5 ceramic sculptures upon it. The window of the gallery is visible at left.

Installation view, Kahlil Robert Irving, Streets:Chains:Cocktails, Callicoon Fine Arts, New York, NY, 2017

A photograph of a close-up of the ceramic sculpture upon a raw wood pedestal in the back of the gallery. In the middle and background is the long raw wooden table that contains 5 ceramic sculptures.

Installation view, Kahlil Robert Irving, Streets:Chains:Cocktails, Callicoon Fine Arts, New York, NY, 2017

A photograph of one ceramic sculpture upon a raw wood pedestal, situated near the back of the gallery.

Installation view, Kahlil Robert Irving, Streets:Chains:Cocktails, Callicoon Fine Arts, New York, NY, 2017

A photograph of a single ceramic sculpture upon a raw wood pedestal, and a framed collograph print.

Installation view, Kahlil Robert Irving, Streets:Chains:Cocktails, Callicoon Fine Arts, New York, NY, 2017

A photograph of Irving's collograph print, framed in black and hung upon the wall.

Installation view, Kahlil Robert Irving, Streets:Chains:Cocktails, Callicoon Fine Arts, New York, NY, 2017

A photograph of a small section of the long raw wood table and one ceramic sculpture upon it, a raw wood pedestal with a single ceramic work upon it, and a collograph print on the far wall framed in black.

Installation view, Kahlil Robert Irving, Streets:Chains:Cocktails, Callicoon Fine Arts, New York, NY, 2017

A photograph of a small ceramic sculpture hung high on the backside of the gallery's temporary wall. In the background is a portion of the raw wood square platform with several sculptures upon it, and the gallery's front window.

Installation view, Kahlil Robert Irving, Streets:Chains:Cocktails, Callicoon Fine Arts, New York, NY, 2017

Press Release

Callicoon Fine Arts is proud to present a solo exhibition of new work by Kahlil Robert Irving, on view from September 8 to October 29. Titled Street:Chains:Cocktails, the exhibition will be comprised of new sculpture, works on paper, and wallpaper. Irving has produced ceramic assemblages out of fired elements that include porcelain, stoneware, gravel, and glass. The highly visceral compositions include a range of imagery, some of which are typical to porcelain vessels like the florals of Messien pottery while other images are taken from news reports surrounding the 2014 killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, a suburb of the city of St. Louis. The exhibition will be accompanied by a publication with an essay by Hannah Klemm, Assistant Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Saint Louis Art Museum. 

Irving’s work derives from decorative arts traditions, post-war industrial design, and contemporary urban culture. Through an amalgamation of popular and autobiographical symbols, Irving’s mastery of material and image produces a reflection on the experience of living in America’s cities today. In the gallery, groups of ceramics include signifiers of quotidian objects. Within Irving’s sculptures are embedded shards of porcelain as if a teacup had been thrown agains the floor, then incorporated into cement gravel. Paint cans, soda bottles, and crumpled styrofoam fast-food containers, are rendered in slip cast porcelain, densely collaged with image decals of fried chicken, cigarette butts, lotto cards, and dripped with black, blue, silver and gold luster. 

Three monoprints serve as an important extension of Irving’s sculpture production. In the series titled “Street View,” Irving embosses and collages detritus and gravel with ink into sheets of paper to make unique constellations of collected litter. Pressed objects and printed textures evoke the ordinary city street either suburban or of the inner-city, transitions between environments, and the similarities found from one space to the next. A digital chain-link fence printed on vinyl further emphasizes a partition wall. Like the decal images that blanket the surface of Kahlil’s ceramics, the all-over pattern, repeats in a series of interlocking black on white loops. This decorative architecture reads as barrier under the guise of making calm for safety, while simultaneously suggesting harmful situations. 

Phrases like “I am Mike” and “No Charges for Wilson,” pulled from press coverage following the killing of Michael Brown, cover areas of the porcelain surface and encapsulate the critical social and political response both nationally and locally near the artist’s home town. In her essay Klemm describes the effect of Irving’s layered use of material and text as “repeated poetics paired with a systematic accumulation of recognizable forms” asserting that the works “astutely question the relationship of abstraction to language, politics and identity.” The merging of words and form repeats in the artist’s choice of titles. Careful pairings like Street Section – After Death (Layered Mass never forgotten) and Mass: Meissen TO – GO (KILLING DAILY; DAILY KILLING), again, pull from the headlines, to combine with words that both describe the material as well as social ritual in the face of collective mourning. The titles read in blue, red, and black, and styled in bold, italicized, underlined, suggest memorialization. In the last lines of her essay Klemm states, “The works in this exhibition are tied up with historical and contemporary practices of how we live together in the world, how we understand what is left behind—the detritus of global capitalism and its impact on local communities and on everyday life. The end product proffers a lyrical and elegiac sense of both belonging and loss.”

Kahlil Robert Irving (born 1992, San Diego, CA) is currently living and working in Saint Louis. He attended the Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Art, Washington University in St. Louis (MFA 2017) and the Kansas City Art Institute (BFA Art History and Ceramics 2015). Upcoming exhibitions include, Ephemora at the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art in Overland Park, Kansas; and the Craft and Folk Art Museum, Los Angeles (both 2017). Additional exhibitions include, FRAME BY FRAME at Callicoon Fine Arts, New York; Desirable Objects | Cabinet at David B. Smith Gallery, Saint Louis; Almost Now, Just Then… at Projects+ Gallery, Saint Louis (all 2017); and Undocumented at Bruno David Gallery, Saint Louis in 2016. In 2016 Irving was a resident artist at the Scuola Internazionale di Grafica in Venice, Italy. In the fall of 2017 he will be in residence at the University of Pecs, in Pecs, Hungary. Kahlil Robert Irving has work in the collections of the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art in Overland Park, Kansas; the Riga Porcelain Museum, in Riga, Latvia; The Ken Ferguson Teaching Collection at the Kansas City Art Institute in Kansas City, Missouri; the Foundation for Contemporary Ceramic Art in Kecskemet, Hungary; and the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, in Jerusalem, Israel.

For additional information contact Photi Giovanis at info@callicoonfinearts.com, or call 212-219-0326.

Callicoon Fine Arts is located at 49 Delancey Street between Forsyth and Eldridge Streets. Gallery hours are Wednesday to Sunday, 10:30am to 6:30pm. The nearest subway stops are the B and D trains at Grand Street and the F, J, M and Z trains at Delancey-Essex Street.

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