Building
Nave
To supplement the fragment
The Apple Stretching
Dog Eared Reverie
Storefront
Local Objects
Framework
I used to be a tree
Building
Greg Carideo, Milano Chow, Will Rogan
12.26
Dallas, TX
Sept 7 – Oct 19, 2024
Dallas, TX
Sept 7 – Oct 19, 2024
TRH
Found cardboard, found beige objects, steel, paint, rust, found fabric, lost/found shoe heel
23.5 x 17 x 12 inches
This sculpture began with a ragged piece of cardboard, seeing how similar it was to the metal material of awnings in my neighborhood. This led to wanting to make a monochrome sculpture, where all the found material matched this cardboard in color naturally. I carried a piece of the cardboard in my wallet for months, comparing it to anything that appeared to match. The rock was a hard find, also the wood was tough, rubber bands turn out to be everywhere, and right under my nose a twisty stick that’s been in my car for years. I think of the objects as impeding a hand reaching in for the heel, one found on a beach of Sicily, somehow, that also matches.
RFG
Found rusted metal, found fabric, steel, lost/found shoe heel
24 x 17.25 x 12 inches
Rust suggests the end of the line for metal, its final state, dry like a skeleton in the desert. All the found materials here are unified in that final rusty stage, despite having their own timeline. Elements of objects that were allowed to be free of their function a long time ago now find a place comfortably together in an artwork, a place that welcomes that sort of thing. Obstructing a hand from reaching in for the heel at the center are pieces of old mattress springs, frail chicken wire and mesh, a section of my backyard fence, metal spirals from the mattress springs holding things together. Two side awnings are made of a small piece of Tim & Georgia’s place upstate. And above it all, an awning made of fabric that spent about a hundred years below the seat of an old chair.
FTR
Found smashed soup cans, t-shirt shoulders, found wood, steel, rivets, rust, lost/found shoe heel
23.75 x 18 x 12.5 inches
Found soup cans, smashed by trucks, cut and riveted together, make a roof. A rural sort of shelter. Boarded up with found scraps of old wood. Urban style awnings made from the shoulders of a faded black tshirt, bringing some of the city back in. Can’t say I wasn’t a little influenced by some time spent working upstate this summer.
Together, Chow, Carideo, and Rogan’s works operate like a city with diverse architectural influences. Chow’s theatrical department store-inspired pieces add a layer of historical luxury and nostalgia, reminiscent of a city's grand landmarks; Carideo’s gritty bodega storefronts provide a counterpoint, representing the everyday pulse and resilience of urban life; and Will's handcrafted wooden structures offer a grounding presence, connecting the past with the present through traditional craftsmanship.
- 12.26
Nave
in lieu gallery
Los Angeles, CA
February 24 – March 30, 2024
Los Angeles, CA
February 24 – March 30, 2024
APC
T-shirt, found shirt, found shoe heel, steel, paint, rust, stitching
15.375 x 21 x 11.625 inches
The painted metal structure here has moments where under layers of paint appear. I love when the ironwork of the city shows evidence of the passage of time and different aesthetic decisions. A lot of my own decisions in these works are guided by an idea of function. I find the mesh here beautiful but it also protects the heal inside. It’s the way a homeowner might do it. Doing things like this connects me with the way things are done elsewhere, outside of art. Much like working within the lineage of art, there’s a lineage of quick fixes, intuitive solution, which shows an urgency not dissimilar to art.
PRS
Found shirt, found shoe heel, steel, silver brazing, stitching
20 x 15.25 x 6 inches
I first noted this fabric thing stuck high up in razor wire in Brooklyn last June. For the next 6 months I would pass it often, knowing I’d get it when it was ready, when I was ready for it. I like knowing there are seemingly insignificant things out there that might have a thought attached to them.
The burst form is sunbleaching from where it was caught in the fence. I’m particularly excited about how it’s attached to the metal structure: a steel rod pierces a native seam of the shirt at the top and bottom. Beneath the shirt is a metal design taken from a building facade in Rome, a lost shoe heel in place for the “empty niche” in Rome.
L_B
T-shirt, found shoe heel, inkjet fabric prints, steel, silver brazing, stitching
21.25 x 18.875 x 7.25 inches
The surface of this piece is made entirely from one sunfaded black t-shirt. The work is very confessional to me: an opening in the center that appears pitch black draws you in. Inside is a lost/found shoe heel. The opening makes me want to whisper something inside. Two niches flank that central interior space, the tops of which are the shoulders of the shirt. Inside each niche are two facing images depicting what I see as an intimate space in Queens where I live: the light from one window spilling onto its neighboring building. Feels like a whisper from mouth to ear.
EBS
T-shirt, found shirt, found shoe heel, steel, rust, found construction cloth, cloth grocery bag, laser prints, other found material
16.125 x 21 x 10 inches
This piece is made entirely of/from my surroundings. Like the rust on the steel bars, the sculpture’s materials carry the conditions where they were found. The side awnings are made from a thrashed striped shirt I found in the train tracks by my studio. The top is a brittle red t-shirt found in the california desert. It feels good to hand wash this material in the studio and give it form/function. The black underbelly is a fresh cloth reusable grocery bag and found construction fencing. Try zooming in to see the metal wire twists that hold the black material to the structure. Mysterious faces float about. Pieces of found mesh fill in the holes. All guarding, protecting, a hidden platform heel inside.
R_G
T-shirt, found shoe heel, steel, paint, stitching
15.5 x 19.625 x 9.5 inches
I think a lot about exteriority vs. interiority in sculpture, physically and conceptually. Interiority equates to shelter and protection. Exteriority is our connection to the world. Awnings exemplify both. These sculptures are protective yet vulnerable, and their materials have moved from one stage to another. The interior space of this piece feels voluminous and comforting with it’s warm yellow glow. When I was a kid, I remember looking inside my shirt and imagining inhabiting that space as some sort of method of escape.
JMZ
T-shirt, found shoe heel, inkjet fabric prints, steel, silver brazing, stitching
13.75 x 21 x 5.25 inches
This piece has retractable curtains. When they’re open, you see a metal design derived from a common yet overlooked detail of nyc. When they’re closed, an image comes together to suggest the origins of that design. After making the piece I realized all of its materials come from “New” places, New York, New Mexico, New Orleans. Interesting linguistic twist to a work thats so much about age.
MSG
T-shirt, found shoe heel, found cotton cloth, corrugated plastic, laser prints, tape, steel, brass, silver brazing, stitching
20 x 17.75 x 7 inches
I wanted to return to a basic awning form here to create the correct conditions for this confessional window. I made the piece to hang next to a window, knowing natural light that would enter the work, from one window into another. I began thinking about this light in Rome recently, seeing the way the churches used light as material in sculpture.
It’s interesting for me to give a material different functions. The metal rods here are both the utilitarian structure, as well as decorative, in the window. Also, the images beneath the plastic are “images” in the artwork, but also have a function of blocking the view of the interior and heel inside.
Within his care, as with the workmanship of a special tailor or cobbler, Carideo’s sensibility is a deft hand that mends the broken and remakes the otherwise forgotten. He preserves rips and tears of weathered t-shirts so as to highlight the fabric, now sheer and threadbare. He centers the broken heel, lost and found, to present its special form. Each discoloration alludes to an unseen story of use or misuse; together, as a palette of weathered shades, the work is an homage to the castoffs and fragments of life’s experiences.
Some of Carideo’s newest welded designs resemble wall facades from European towns, or perhaps, the bottom tread of a new boot. The heel shape that reappears, and that the artist celebrates, is also the shape of a true Roman arch or portico. A fascination regarding the possibility of image and form allows each artwork to reimagine the criteria of function, use, adornment, and ornament. With visual serendipity, these offerings elaborate on form as function, and propose the ornament. With visual serendipity, these offerings elaborate on form as function, and propose the idea we can make everything out of anything and anything out of everything.
A canopy, shade, or awning is actually an impossibly simple and universal gesture that offers protection from the physical elements. Yet, as with so many things, bare-bones pragmatics can only sustain for so long, and practicality must give way to the tender and mysterious.
Look down, look up, and bear witness to the ravages and splendor of life– take refuge in the possibility of beauty as shelter, an elegy for a disappearing world.
- Candice Chu
To supplement the fragment
Public Gallery
London, ENG
April 17 – May 18, 2024
London, ENG
April 17 – May 18, 2024
MAB
T-shirt, steel, silver brazing, found shoe heel
23 x 14 x 15.125 inches
I found this shirt in the gutter, collaged and stretched it over an elliptical dome, wider than it is deep. The design beneath comes from another building facade in Rome, where the stonework frames an arched niche intentionally left empty. A lost/found heel occupies that space here. Three places converging, working for each other.
YHF
T-shirt, found shirt, painted cardboard, steel, paint, rust, stitching, metal wire, found shoe heel
17 x 21 x 10.625 inches
Sunrises all over the city. Sunrise to keep people out, sunset to keep your AC in. Paint is a fixer, metal a clock. Cardboard is corrugated like a rolling gate, so I rolled it up. I fixed the blues with more blues. Most awnings used to be striped, and this shirt I found is proof.
The Apple Stretching
Yuji Agematsu, Kamrooz Aram, Seth Becker, Greg Carideo, Paloma Izquierdo, Y. Malik Jalal, David L. Johnson, Vijay Masharani, Erin Morris, Nicky Nodjoumi, Carlos Reyes, Count Slima, Tabboo!, Alix Vernet, Kristin Walsh
Helena Anrather
New York, NY
January 5 – February 10, 2024
New York, NY
January 5 – February 10, 2024
ABM
T-shirt shoulders, found striped shirt, found shoe heel, steel, paint, rust
15.625 x 20.625 x 10 IN.
At the top of this piece is a shirt I found in the dirt, brought back and hand washed. The side half domes are the shoulders of a weathered old t shirt. The frame of this piece has rust emerging from the white paint. At its center is a worn down purple heel. Notice how the metal frame stops where the heel is worn down.
Dog Eared Reverie
New York, NY
May 13 – June 18, 2023
PLM
T-shirt, pillowcase, found fabric, found shoe heel, steel, silver brazing, stitching
21 x 12.5 x 8.5 inches
I made these curtains from an old yellowed pillowcase to veil a heel. The small flowers in the fabric that define the cloisters are colored in by hand. If you look closely inside the top edge of the piece you’ll see the collar of the threadbare sky blue t-shirt that makes up the curve.
BWA
T-shirt, found shoe heel, steel, silver brazing, stitching
16.75 x 18.5 x 5.25 inches
This piece is also made from a single sun faded black t-shirt, rearranged to create a halo of light around the arch. For whatever reason when I made it I was thinking about what an artwork would see, if it could. The shirt is riddled with tiny holes, which to my surprise, act as tiny aperatures or camera obscuras, making faint projections of the room inside its shadowy interior, giving you an idea of what it would see..
SRE
T-shirt, found fabric, found shoe heel, inkjet fabric prints, steel, silver brazing, stitching
18 x 9.5 x 6.625 inches
This piece has movable doors, to reveal or hide the heel, which required me to design and make steel hinges. These sculptures are as much about interior space as they are about exteriors, and their surfaces. They are facades but also chambers to inhabit.
ZFM
T-shirt, found fabric, trim, found shoe heel, steel, silver brazing, stitching
18 x 16.375 x 5.125 inches
Every piece in this show feels like an individual with a unique personality to me. It’s interesting to make an object that embodies a human sensibility or potentially a gender.. Considering each work for this show meant I was curating a social dynamic, like putting together a dinner party. The works are frontal like we are, and in the show they face eachother as we do in a room.
DCO
Polyester, graphite, acrylic paint, laser prints, found shoe heel, steel, silver brazing, stitching
15 x 19.5 x 4.75 inches
I wanted to make a piece that had a metal surface, common to medieval reliquaries. The surface is a patchwork of polyester scraps from previous works, painted various colors, and then drawn on with heavy graphite. Behind the caged archway is the most weathered and decrepit heel I’ve found, cracking and shriveled like a mummified relic.
TSD
T-shirt, found shoe heel, steel, silver brazing, stitching
17 x 10 x 5.25 inches
JLD
T-shirts, found shoe heel, inkjet fabric prints, stitching, steel, silver brazing
20.5 x 10 x 6 inches
Sorting through pictures to use in/as artworks is similar to finding heels. Sometimes the best images are the easiest. After setting the heel, I found these two pictures deep in my hard drive, taken years ago, in a neighborhood in new york where all the galleries have now moved to.
GFK
T-shirt, found shoe heel, inkjet fabric prints, steel, silver brazing, stitching
20 x 17 x 6.5 inches
The surface of this piece is made entirely from a single sunbleached green t-shirt, with the addition of two cellphone pics printed on fabric. The process of rearranging this one shirt based on the yellowed discolored regions felt like skin grafting, or clone stamping in photoshop, finding what I needed in the small amount of material available to me. An archway frames up a small heal housed inside the architecture, like a medieval reliquary.
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-assculpture 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 buchette def 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 iourney. 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 funnels, 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.
- foreign & domestic
Storefront
FR MoCA
Fall River, MA
May 14 – July 14, 2022
Fall River, MA
May 14 – July 14, 2022
48-18
T-shirt, iron-on images, lost shoe heels, stitching, steel, bronze brazing
17.5 x 24.5 x 5.25 inches
I’ve been picking up lost shoe heels from the ground since 2014. The collection is in the hundreds. Here are three, built into this sculpture, set beneath three moons. Lost heels and the moon: two things I look for everyday in the city.
It all felt right when FR MoCA and I learned this space in Fall River was a former shoe repair shop, with a basement full of heels.
23-50
T-shirts, inkjet prints on fabric, stitching, steel, silver brazing
17 x 26 x 5.5 inches
66-31
T-shirt, steel, silver brazing
26 x 16 x 6.125 inches
I made this work to showcase this shirt, which I found so beautiful. I love the fade in saturation of yellow into the threadbare region.
Local Objects
International Objects
New York, NY
March 14 – May 28, 2023
New York, NY
March 14 – May 28, 2023
80-80
T-shirts, brass, silver brazing
21.5 x 53 x 5.5 inches
I made this piece a year ago after searching for two identically weathered black t-shirts. Occasionally you will find or know someone that buys a set of shirts that they alternate throughout the week, setting multiple objects in motion at the same time. These two seemed to have parallel paths, were subjected to the same time. Brass felt fitting for this clock of sorts.
Framework
GRIMM
New York, NY
September 10 – October 18, 2021
New York, NY
September 10 – October 18, 2021
66-44
T-shirts, polyester, latex and acrylic paint, image transfers, stitching, steel, bronze brazing
18.25 x 32.75 x 5.75 inches
T-shirt, inkjet prints on fabric, found fabric, stitching, steel, bronze brazing
27.75 x 23.5 x 5.75 inches
T-shirt, inkjet prints on fabric, found fabric, stitching, steel, bronze brazing
27.75 x 23.5 x 5.75 inches
T-shirts, inkjet print on fabric, found fabric, found objects, stitching, steel, bronze brazing
26 x 21.5 x 5.5 inches
T-shirts, found fabric, stitching, laserjet print, magnets, steel, bronze brazing
36.125 x 37.625 x 6.125 inches
Inkjet print on fabric, stretched over hand-shaped board
15.25 x 12 x .75 inches
One of five mattress works in the show. The mattress aligns with the front edges of the substrate, which are rounded. The sides reveal the space/things around the mattress captured in the photo, i.e. the bottle and mask.
Consolatio
Inkjet print on fabric, stretched over hand-shaped board
15.25 x 12 x .75 inches
Inkjet print on fabric, stretched over hand-shaped board
15.25 x 12 x .75 inches
Something for Easter
Inkjet print on fabric, stretched over hand-shaped board
15.25 x 12 x .75 inches
Love Comes Quality
Inkjet print on fabric, stretched over hand-shaped board
15.25 x 12 x .75 inches
For Carideo, the cellphone camera is an extension of the body and the mind. He keeps archives of his old cellphone images and looks through them frequently, reviewing the pictures for small details and impressions that catch his attention. From these files he creates visual compendiums that record the city in flux. Cherished moments and places, snapshots of the urban milieu, communicate the immediacy of the metropolis along with the nostalgia of faded portraits.
Carideo describes the evolution of this series and its concrete everyday subject matter:
“[Awnings] are large bulky things. Sometimes flashy, classy, or hideous and they are everywhere in New York City. Awnings can say a lot about a place. Often, they show signs of a vanishing city…Each work in this series is compositionally grounded by an arch and a T-shirt’s collar that rides its curve. A tunnel in one work mirrors a pocket in another, or the simple yet satisfying link between an awning’s curve and the way a person’s shoulders transition to their back. These materials visually intertwine, making it difficult to discern photographic images from imagery found in the the form of sun bleaching or preexisting graphic prints.”
The awnings will be exhibited alongside a parallel series of photo-sculptures, creating a dialogue between two modes of collecting, arranging, and presenting traces of the city. In this parallel series, Carideo photographs discarded mattresses, prints the images on fabric, and fits them over hand-shaped boards. He selects his source imagery for the way that light interacts with the undulating surface and material quality of his subject matter. They dislocate this familiar sight – at once dormant, immobile, and repellant – from the context of the New York City’s streets to become objects on a scale that can be held.
- Anna Ruth Yates