Carlos Motta (b. 1978) examines multicultural political histories of those oppressed for their sexuality and gender in projects that engage an array of media, including installation, video, photography, and sculpture. Our presentation of Inverted World, 2016, a new video work with sculptural and photographic components, will complement Carlos Motta: Histories of the Future (July 15, 2016 – January 15, 2017), a survey exhibition of recent works on view at the Perez Art Museum. Inverted World follows a performance wherein two men artfully tied the artist’s feet, elevated, and inverted him in the chapel at Tenuta Dello Scompiglio. Informed by BDSM practice, as well as Caravaggio’s and Guido Reni’s paintings of the crucifixion of St. Peter, this thirty-minute inversion ritual physicalizes the queer theological work of Marcella Althaus-Reid (1952-2009), who challenged sexual semiotics to reconsider Christian orthodoxies of decency and indecency. Inverted World is one third of a three-channel video installation, Réquiem, 2016, which was commissioned by the Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires (MALBA). The installation investigates the tense dynamic between organized religion and dissident sexualities, proposing alternatives to the moralism sanctioned by Christian doctrine. Carlos Motta’s work has been exhibited at the Tate Modern, London; the New Museum, the Guggenheim Museum, and MoMA/PS1, New York; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; the Museo de Arte del Banco de la República, Bogota; Serralves Museum, Porto; the Museu d’Art Contemporani, Barcelona; the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens; the Sala de Arte Público Siqueiros, Mexico; Castello di Rivoli, Turin; CCS Bard Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale-on-Hudson; San Francisco Art Institute; Hebbel am Ufer, Berlin; and X Lyon Biennale; among others. Motta was awarded the Main Prize of the Future Generation Award, Pinchuk Art Centre, Kiev (2014) and nominated for a Guggenheim (2008). He has received grants from Art Matters (2008), NYSCA (2010), and the Creative Capital Foundation (2012). He lives and works in New York City and is a professor at Parsons, The New School of Design. Motta’s first exhibition with P·P·O·W, Deviations, April 21 - May 21, 2016, was reviewed in The New York Times, Artforum.com and Bomb Magazine.

Carolee Schneemann (b. 1939) As one of the first artists to use her body in her work, Schneemann activated and took control over the formerly mute female nude with a multidisciplinary practice that includes painting, assemblage, performance, and film. By connecting the kinetic nature of her paintings and assemblages to her radical performances and films, Schneemann’s work has made a permanent mark on the history of art. On view will be a rare early painting from 1961 entitled J. & C., which was created during the marriage of Schneemann and the avant-garde composer James Tenney. Balancing gestural brushwork with evocative text and mixed-media, J. & C. demonstrates the artist’s continued aim to push painting beyond the canvas. We will also feature Ices Strip 1972 a performance which was photographed by her then partner, artist Anthony McCall. The performance took place on a British Rail train traveling between London and Edinburgh. Ices Strip involved Schneemann undressing and redressing on a dining car table as she prepared to roller-skate the length of the train as it moved between the two cities. Schneemann then paired the photographic sequence of her actions to Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, which were sequenced to rail markers tracking the journey. Schneemann’s work has been exhibited worldwide, at institutions including the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art; the Whitney Museum of American Art and The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Tate Modern, London; the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; and The Reina Sophia Museum, Madrid. Her published books include Cezanne; She Was A Great Painter (1976); Early and Recent Work (1983); More Than Meat Joy: Complete Performance Works and Selected Writings (1979); Correspondence Course (2010) by Kristine Stiles, and Imaging Her Erotics–Essays, Interviews, Projects (2002). A retrospective of her work opened at the Salzburg Museum in November of 2015, and will open at the Museum fur Moderne Kunst Frankfurt am Main, Germany in May of 2017. A feature length film on Schneemann’s work and history entitled Breaking the Frame by Marielle Nitoslawska has been screened at the Telluride Film Festival, BFI/London Film Festival, ICA London and FNC Montreal. Currently on view is Schneemann’s joint exhibition, Further Evidence, at Galerie Lelong and P·P·O·W from October 21 – December 3, 2016.

David Wojnarowicz (1954-1992) channeled a vast accumulation of raw images, sounds, memories and lived experiences into a powerful voice that was an undeniable presence in the New York City art scene of the 1970s, 80s, and early 90s. Through his several volumes of fiction, poetry, memoirs, painting, photography, installation, sculpture, film, and performance, Wojnarowicz left a legacy, affirming art’s vivifying power in a society he viewed as alienating and corrosive. On view will be Untitled (Buffalos) 1988-89 a work that has become an icon of the AIDS crisis. While at a cursory glance the image appears to be taken from life, it in fact depicts a diorama from the National Museum of Natural History in D.C. which illustrated a traditional Native American method for hunting. Wojnarowicz saw the falling buffalos as a metaphor for the impending extinction imminent in all cultures, whose structures are dictated by acceleration, collision, and the impossibility of escape. While Wojnarowicz never directly stated that the photograph was a political response to the AIDS crisis, the work was developed in the wake of his own diagnosis. Wojnarowicz died of AIDS-related complications on July 22, 1992 at the age of 37. His artwork has been included in solo and group exhibitions around the world, at institutions such as The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; The American Center, Paris, France; The Busan Museum of Modern Art, Korea; Centro Galego de Art Contemporanea, Santiago de Compostela, Spain; The Barbican Art Gallery, London; and the Museum Ludwig, Cologne Germany. His works are in permanent collections of major museums internationally and the subject of significant scholarly studies. Highly influential to the current generation of artists, writers, and activists, his work continues to be the subject of important exhibitions. Wojnarowicz has had three retrospectives: at the galleries of the Illinois State University in 1990 curated by Barry Blinderman; at the New Museum in 1999 curated by Dan Cameron; and his forthcoming traveling retrospective will open at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2018, co-curated by David Kiehl and David Breslin.