Zuriel Waters
Pent-up House
March 25 - April 17, 2022

My Pet Ram is pleased to present Pent-up House, a solo exhibition by Brooklyn-based artist Zuriel Waters. 

"I created this collection of work over the last 6 months or so. Every piece is constructed entirely from sewn fabric and acrylic paint. There is no wooden armature and they are very flat. Small dress pins hold the work to the wall via very thin d-rings which are sewn into the topstitch on the reverse side. From the beginning of this project the work has always been meant to fold up, each iteration carefully planned to fit inside a box which holds between 15-20 pieces and of which I can store about 10 of in my small home studio. They are designed to give a maximum amount of wallspace with a minimum amount of storage. 

Each piece is created one-after the-other, never simultaneously, in an iterative process which retains traces of time of year as well as my temporal psychological condition. Because they are so rooted in seasonality I sometimes think of them as a form of fashion design (I have heard that there can be as many as 52 seasons in a fashion year, too brisk a pace for painting maybe, I aim for about half that). I also collect a lot of color information from walks around my neighborhood and in this way the work participates in a constructivist reduction of the urban environment, a kind of futurist landscape painting.

In the past I have referred to my individual pieces as “bugs”, borrowing from Starship Troopers vernacular for aliens (but also in the sense that anything can be a bug, a bugger, a cute term of endearment) and in a way I do like this metaphor as it allows them to be seen perhaps as butterflies suspended in a state of perpetual metamorphoses. But this is just a convenience, a way of hinting at their figurativeness, their “being-ness”, because they are in fact aliens from the 2nd dimension, an invasive species of ‘flatlanders’ who occupy wallspace and transform it into something more dynamic and spectral. It is my ambition to create an art which adds value to people’s lives, like a kind of roomba-esque automaton, a “machine-for-living” designed to help rid a house of the despair caused by pallid, static walls.

“Pent-Up House” is a jazz standard written in the 1950s by Sonny Rollins. The melody is inscrutable, led in with a bright vertical line it is immediately overtaken by a repetitive phrase that dementedly teeter-totters back and forth, up and down, over and over, almost on the verge of insanity before resolving finally into a solemn dissonance, like an ellipses. Within the confines of traditional song structure Rollins almost seems to reach for what Eric Satie might call “furniture music” and what to me feels nearly architectural, as if the melody is describing more than just the emotional state of the house but also it’s structure, winding itself around the joists and supporting beams, attempting to become a tangible, nearly physical thing. It is this sense of derangement-becoming-ambience that I feel related to in this body of work. Like being embraced by the frenetic stasis of a mental hospital. Disquieting yet consistent, anxious yet reassuring, mind-numbing yet safe, and in a way, very pleasant…"

Zuriel Waters was born in 1984 in Philadelphia, PA, and lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Received an MFA in Painting from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2010 and a BA in Interdisciplinary Studies from San Diego State University in 2007. Has shown work in group exhibitions throughout New York City at galleries such as Underdonk, Safe Gallery, Regina Rex, CANADA, Orgy Park and others and has recently had a solo show at Left Field Gallery in Los Osos, CA.

Pent-up House will be on view Friday, March 25 through Sunday, April 17, 2022. Please join us for an artist reception on Saturday, March 26 from 6-9pm. The gallery is located at 48 Hester Street in the Lower East Side. Gallery hours are Wed-Sun from 12-7pm and by appointment. For inquiries and more information about this exhibition, please email info@mypetram.com.

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