Please join HB381 and Zimra Beiner for an artist walkthrough of his solo exhibition Eating the Floor on Saturday, January 10 at 2:30pm
Eating the Floor is Zimra Beiner’s second solo exhibition with the gallery, following If It Holds It Grows at Hostler Burrows LA. Beiner (b. 1985, Canada) is well-known for his knotted, rough-hewn, almost molten ceramic works which take the form of latticework arabesques in stoneware clay. He often aims to examine what he calls “the intersection between reality and fiction,” asking the viewer to consider how the physical substance of clay, gritty with aggregate, and glazes, eddying together, are inflected with representational fictions. For Eating the Floor, Beiner turns his attention to the two-dimensional plane — the floor — producing ink and photo emulsion-based works on paper which foreground the traces of their production. The works’ compositions are sliced and segmented by creases, perforated to reveal the act of making as much as they might conjure familiar textures and imagery. Each work, having been folded into the shape of a funnel, cone, filter, sieve, or other vessel, becomes the substrate for a momentary action. Beiner pours ink or emulsion into each form, allowing it to drain naturally and mark the paper. Once dry, these products of experimentation in the studio reveal elegant radial patterns, diagrammatic in form yet evocative of macro and microscopic structures.
Beiner received a BFA from NSCAD University and an MFA from Alfred University in 2012. His work has been exhibited internationally, including solo exhibitions at Hostler Burrows, Cross Mackenzie Gallery, Craft Ontario, and group exhibitions at the Gardiner Museum, Art Gallery of Alberta, Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, and the Katzen Museum at American University. He has attended residencies at the Berlin Ceramics Centre, Private Studio Jingdezhen, China, and the Center for Contemporary Ceramics at California State University Long Beach. He has been the recipient of the the Winnifred Shantz Award and the NCECA Emerging Artist Award and received grants from the Canada Council for the Arts and the Alberta Foundation for the Arts. He has taught at numerous institutions, including as an assistant professor at the Alberta University of the Arts, lecturer at Princeton University, Bowling Green State University, and as an adjunct faculty at New York University and Millersville University.
Saturday, January 10, 2:30pm
381 Broadway, New York, NY, 10013