11R is pleased to present an exhibition of new works by the collaborative duo of Dave Miko & Tom Thayer, on view May 5 – June 9, 2017 in 11R’s West Gallery. For their exhibitions at The Kitchen in 2011, and at 11R in 2013, Miko & Thayer projected animated videos onto paintings that delivered narratives about the architecture surrounding, and mutability of, power and isolation. Continuing with this theme and hybrid format, Miko & Thayer will here present a group of new work based on the story of Rip Van Winkle.
As told by Washington Irving, Rip Van Winkle is something of a neighborhood personality, beleaguered by his wife for preferring socializing and wandering the mountains of the Catskills to farm work and domestic responsibility. On one of his escapist walks in the wilderness, Van Winkle encounters the ghosts of Henry Hudson’s mutinied sailing crew, who’s potent elixir induces a twenty-year “sleep”, through which Van Winkle not only misses the American Revolutionary War but sidesteps all other personal responsibility.
Van Winkle’s twenty-year absence is the point of departure for Miko + Thayer’s new body of work, all dated 2017. Synthesizing paint with heavily effected video of puppetry and props, Miko + Thayer’s pieces suggest a series of fish tanks, that are in their words, “containers that suspend both threat and agency”.
Dave Miko (b. 1974, lives and works in New York) and Tom Thayer (b. 1970, lives and works in New Jersey) maintain separate practices in addition to working together. In collaboration, they have had exhibitions at The Kitchen, NY; Doyers Street, NY; Steven Zevitas Gallery, Boston; and 11R, New York. Miko & Thayer’s work has been featured in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Modern Painters, and Artforum, among other publications.