MIKE NUDELMAN: And Yet

Fortnight Institute is pleased to present And Yet, a solo exhibition of recent drawings by Mike Nudelman. Presenting familiar materials in unfamiliar ways, his methodically layered images dissolve into an array of inky hatchings. And yet, like the dazzling pixels on an illuminated screen, the ballpoint pen strokes simultaneously mask and reveal what enigmatic sights lie beyond the paper's surface. 

Many of the drawings are based on the melancholic UFO photographs created by Swiss contactee Eduard Albert 'Billy' Meier in the 1970s. Deconstructing layers of illusion, time, scale, and mediation on sublime landscapes has been a central focus of Nudelman's work for the past decade. Here, these ideas are explored further through a disorienting sense of deja vu which permeates many of the scenes, as traces of branch geometries, saucer forms, and sloping horizons echo from one drawing to the next. 

Is it not true that a given individual - an individual subjected like all others to event and history - has particular and specific remembrances as well as things forgotten? I shall risk setting up a formula: tell me what you forget and I will tell you who you are. Perhaps one never knows anyone else well enough to make this kind of prediction (and yet...). But that is not the question. Don't we all have a certain number of images that stay around in our head, which we undoubtedly call memories and improperly so, and which we can never get rid of because they return in our sky with the regularity of a comet - torn away also from a world about which we know almost nothing?   - Marc Augé, Oblivion

Absence is weightless, and yet it bears a heavy presence that signals both the recognition of loss through negation and unfamiliarity with the aftereffect of the removal. The created object that does not offer perceptual guidance and systematic orientation creates distress because it steers from familiarity - oriented by an objective vanishing point - in a situation that is expected to be, and in some ways is, familiar. - Natasha Chuk, Vanishing Points

The challenging title of this book, And Yet…They Fly!, is intended first of all to remind us of the saying, "And yet...it moves!," attributed to the famous Italian naturalist, Galileo Galilei and his observations of Jupiter's moons.  - Guido Moosbrugger, And Yet...They Fly!

I remember - very vividly, though it took place many years ago - a conversation with Roger Fry. We were talking about Monet's "Water Lilies." They had no right, Roger kept insisting, to be so shockingly unorganized, so totally without a proper compositional skeleton. They were all wrong, artistically speaking. And yet, he had to admit, and yet…. And yet, as I should now say, they were transporting. An artist of astounding virtuosity had chosen to paint a close-up of natural objects seen in their own context and without reference to merely human notions of what's what, or what ought to be what. Man, we like to say, is the measure of all things. For Monet, on this occasion, water lilies were the measure of water lilies; and so he painted them. - Aldous Huxley, Heaven and Hell

Mike Nudelman (b. 1985, Smithtown, NY) currently lives & works in Santa Fe, NM. He received a BFA in Printmaking from Cornell University & an MFA in Painting & Drawing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His work has been exhibited at Geoffrey Young Gallery (Great Barrington), SPRING/BREAK Art Show (New York), Hyde Park Art Center (Chicago), Thomas Robertello Gallery (Chicago), Devening Projects + Editions (Chicago), & Hecho a Mano (Santa Fe), among others.