Press Release (Cycle VI)
Text & Curatorial Production by Onyedika Chuke & Kira Wilson
September 27th - January 19th, 2024
Press Release (Cycle VI) marks the first year of Storage at 52 Walker Street in Tribeca.
On this occasion, we celebrate the ambitious, communal, and build-it-yourself nature of the founding of Storage with a presentation by Jeff Way (b.1942) and Carolyn Oberst (b.1946), two Tribeca-based artists who share a similar ethos.
In Press Release (Cycle VI), archival and recent works by Jeff Way and Carolyn Oberst are curated to examine modalities of labor and transcendence within the historical canon of painting. The exhibition also explores 50+ years of camaraderie between Oberst and Way, who have cohabited in their Walker St loft since the 1970s, but have found disparate modes of artistic exploration.
Similar in the practices of Oberst and Way are references to a blue-collar ideology of making, as they both experiment with the notion of the ‘frame’. Oberst restores discarded frames before painting in and on them, while Way utilizes the explosive gesture of a chalk line tool, often found in carpenters’ work boxes.
Carolyn Oberst shares work from the series Dresser Back (1989-1998), wherein she paints natural scenes within structures made from reclaimed “dresser backs”. As she refinishes the frames she imbues them with transcendent energy garnered from her 30 years of yoga and meditation practice, forming new altars from objects with past existences. She builds from a non-Western canon, in lieu of the mirror that once existed within the frame, as a simulacrum of nurturing and mementos of past societies.
Jeff Way’s oeuvre challenges our knowledge of abstract painters in the 1960s-70s downtown New York art scene. This exhibition presents works from the series Chalk Line Paintings (1969-present) and Eccentric Squares (2016-present), as we explore the artist’s transition from his experiments using a carpenter’s chalk line tool, to the acrylic paint brush which he did not adopt until his late-career. Way’s process-driven approach has decentralized the lineal form canonized by artists such as Piet Mondrian (b. 1872-1944), Agnes Martin (b. 1912-2004), and Sol Lewitt (b.1928-2007).
Carolyn Oberst (b. 1946) lives and works in New York City. Originally from Philadelphia, she settled in New York City in the 1970s after living in London, Southern Spain, and Morocco, drawing and gathering influences along the way. She studied drawing at the Art Students League under Marshall Glasier on an Instructor’s Special Scholarship; her painting is self-taught.
Her work has been exhibited in solo and group shows with Stellar Highway, Sara Nightingale Gallery, Margaret Bodell Gallery, El Barrio’s Artspace PS 109, and more in New York City and other cities in The United States. Internationally, she has participated in two-person exhibitions in Seoul, South Korea and an artists’ residency in Oaxaca, Mexico. Her work is held in private and corporate collections.
Jeff Way (b. 1942) has lived and worked in the Tribeca neighborhood of New York City since 1975. He holds a BA from Kenyon College (Gambier, OH) and an MA from New York University (New York, NY). Way's work has been the subject of a solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York, NY) in 1974.
Subsequent solo and group exhibitions of the artist were held at Pam Adler Gallery (New York, NY), Mitchell Algus Gallery (New York, NY), Lesley Heller Gallery (New York, NY), The New Museum of Contemporary Art (New York, NY), The Whitney Museum of American Art (New York, NY), and more. Major collections of Way's work include The Philadelphia Museum of Art, Denver Art Museum, The New Museum of Contemporary Art, and The Whitney Museum of American Art.