This exhibition features work by Alicia Adamerovich, Julian Adon Alexander, Rich Auth, Brian Bellott & Tyson Reeder, Joe Bradley, Willa Cosinuke, Liam Halvorsen, William Hawkins, Tenki Hiramatsu, Keke Hunt, Dylan Solomon Kraus, Hedi Kyle, Snejina Latev, BP Laval, Santiago Licata, Bernadette Mayer, Chris Milic, Matthew Miller, Flannery McDonnell, Dorthea Sunier Pierce, Lance De Los Reyes, Elliott Jamal Robbins, Vanessa Gully Santiago, Robin Schavoir, Gunther Schutzenhofer, Victor Timofeev, and Children's Art From the Rhoda Kellogg Collection.

In Austrian Anthroposophist Frederick Hiebel’s First Approach to Mineralogy, he describes the transformation of graphite to diamond. He writes, “...when pure carbon, or graphite, crystallizes in the form of an octahedron, the greatest miracle of transformation takes place from the darkest opaque substance to the lightest most transparent one: the diamond. We can see in diamonds the pure splendor of sunlight as though, in them, the whole earth had begun to turn toward a future in which its darkness will be overcome by the power of light.” Graphite’s veiled luminescence is what I imagine to be the essence of our shadow. An erasable, brittle substance, if left for one billion years, transforms into a stone so powerful that it is unable to be cut by any other mineral. Its marks last on earth longer than human life. Past presenting future – an immeasurable duality like all things. Graphite’s potential to shade, reveal, and record prefigures its eventual earthly petrification. “Me and My Shadow / My Shadow and I” is a collection of work that I see to be connected to this vast cosmic archive. Each piece uniquely tethered to the alchemical, shimmering and mysterious nature of the mineral kingdom and thus ourselves.

• Blair Blumberg

Rhoda Kellogg was an educator, an early childhood development advocate and an artist who amassed a collection of over two million samples of children’s art in her lifetime. Brian Belott became involved with the Rhoda Kellogg Child Art Foundation archive, eventually exhibiting a large portion of it at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise in the exhibition Dr Kid, President. Belott’s own graphite contribution to the exhibition is a loving recreation of a lost drawing originally made by Belott in High School and later reconstructed as an apology for being misplaced by Tyson Reeder. Sketch pages by the late graffiti artist Lance de Los Reyes were also generously loaned by Belott. Rich Auth and Matthew Miller, both artists from progressive art Studio Route 29 in Frenchtown, NJ, use graphite to render rich planetary and historically grounded works that serve as windows into their individual spheres of interest. Their work parallels drawings by outsider artists William Hawkins and Günther Schützenhöfer who similarly created from an innate and imaginative internal well. Dorothea Sunier Pierce’s drawings were part of a lifelong devotion to Anthroposophy, the spiritualist movement surrounding the teachings of Rudolf Steiner. Dylan Solomon Kraus, whose work is also inspired by the natural world and the occult, finds his illuminated mineral influences in the urban environment of New York City. Flannery McDonnell similarly chooses to highlight an internal illumination made possible by the mutable nature of graphite with their large-scale hand built room divider. Snejina Latev delicately incises an interlocking fish motif into a monolith of graphite on paper, creating a silvery luminescence. Santiago Licata crystallizes space and the cosmos in prismatic, soft light. Vanessa Gully Santiago explores the dark void of the medium with figures that radiate an anxious, spotlit vulnerability. Liam Halvorsen uses his skilled draftsmanship to render surreal, often dreamlike landscapes. Bernadette Mayer, the late poet and artist, employs her signature deep-cutting, stream of consciousness style in a collaboration with her son, Max Warsh, who has lovingly handwritten her poem Max Carries the One. Elliott Jamal Robbins similarly uses text, animated in motion, to decontextualize narratives in our collective unconscious. His drawing, which is the namesake of the exhibition “Me and My Shadow / My Shadow and i”, is central to the spiritual heartbeat of this collection of work. Joe Bradley’s honed in visual language is often a dialogue between his canvases and his works on paper, with a raw purist style of drawing serving as the backbone of the practice. Willa Cosinuke, Tenki Hiramstsu, Alicia Adamerovich, and Robin Schavoir use graphite drawings as a way of conceiving later paintings, while keeping the heart and soul in hand drawn form. Graphite as a means to access the subconscious is evident in the work of Chris Milic, Viktor Timofeev, and renowned book artist Hedi Kyle. Keke Hunt’s tattoo flash is a window into her robust, prolific world of poetry, line work and stardust. BP Laval’s all-seeing one-eyed, one-legged “cowgirls and boys” are hanging out on what BP calls The Love Farm where they “...get up to all kinds of mischievous behavior… a metaphor for the times we live in.”