PURE SMOKE CULTURE

Anthony Greaney proudly presents PURE SMOKE CULTURE, organized by artist Nick Kramer. This exhibition gathers diverse works by seven New York- and Los Angeles-based artists whose pieces bear the marks of process yet retain their essential form—the results of a refinement solid as particulate smog yet fanciful as smoke. A text by Sarah Conaway accompanies the exhibition.

PURE SMOKE CULTURE arises from Kramer's interest in art as a mode of experience, bringing these seven related artists into direct conversation. Their work begins with objects pulled whole from the lived environment. These grasped materials are more and less than readymades; they are collage elements on a human scale. Each piece evinces both its materiality and the artists' manual manipulations. Yet the pieces reveal their origins or reflect their internal structure. The mutability of ideas adheres to the stability of objects.

In the heady haze of PURE SMOKE CULTURE, the world is grabbed, felt, dirtied, damaged, adorned, made useless, made attractive, or otherwise apprehended by roving artists. Sean Kennedy distills the banal aesthetic of many Los Angeles neighborhoods, turning security gratings into supports for rich painted gradients—just as Sarah Braman's cut-up pieces of campers become vehicles for an investigation of light and substance. The spare compositions of Bill Jenkins often feature grimy objects defined as much by the weather as by their manufacturers or the artist. Anya Kielar's figures emerge from disruptions in the weave and weft of unfinished muslin. Sarah Conaway constructs still lifes from humble materials that, once photographed, echo classical forms. Jedediah Caesar collects and then dissects detritus within sliced resin blocks that then constitute his sculpture, while the apparent interior structures of Justin Beal's cast rubber wall works seem to strain against their surfaces, implying a materiality that is not there.

Even the show's title,PURE SMOKE CULTURE, is derived from an ad glimpsed in a head shop in Kramer's neighborhood. The solid burns into the air, parting at the wave of a hand. These artists drift through cityscapes suffused with art.