Thought Experiment 1
Thought Experiment 1
November 26 – December 21, 2024
Liz Collins, Darrel Ellis, Miguel Ferrando, Adam Henry, John Houck, Gail Thacker, Yi Xin Tong, Stacy Lynn Waddell
CANDICE MADEY is pleased to launch Thought Experiment. This occasion marks the gallery’s first online exhibition – a playful and colorful presentation that highlights recent drawings, studies, and experimental works that embrace free association and reflections of subconscious memory. The exhibition is, in itself, an exploratory and hybrid platform that encourages an extended dialogue among new works in the gallery.
Thought Experiment includes work by Liz Collins, Darrel Ellis, Miguel Ferrando, Adam Henry, John Houck, Gail Thacker, Yi Xin Tong, and Stacy Lynn Waddell, viewable on our online platform and in the gallery by appointment through December 21. Please visit us at 1 Rivington Street or email info@candicemadey.com for more information.
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Image details: John Houck, Bendix 2, 2024, 10 x 8 inches, Oil on linen mounted on panel (above and previous).
Eiko Blowing Sparkles, 2024
Analog color print from a 665 Polaroid black and white negative and acrylic
24 x 20 inches
$10,000
Gail Thacker’s divergent approach to photography involves subjecting images taken with Polaroid 665 positive-negative film to experimental chemical processes that encourage the negatives’ decay, revealing in material form the artist’s metaphysical views about temporality and the transience of lived experience–a process she began in the 1980s at a time when she lost many friends to AIDS. Photos are often overlaid with painting or stitching, as seen here, and include friends, lovers, and performers at the Gene Frankel Theatre on Bond Street in Manhattan, which she directed for over 20 years.
Untitled (Dog), ca. 1988–1991
Gelatin silver print with colored ink and pen
8 x 10 inches
$12,000
Darrel Ellis was part of a 1980s art movement in the Bronx where he grew up as well the downtown New York scene. He created a radical new approach to portraiture and photography that is being newly examined through the lens of his personal biography. Here, he reinterprets a photo of the family dog, taken in the 1950s by his deceased father – drawing over the image with colored ink a dynamic example of his experimentation and innovation.
Bendix 2, 2024
10 x 8 inches
Oil on linen mounted on panel
$2,000
Houck explores the symbolic and psychoanalytical reading of shadows in a series of focused, small-scale color studies that render a single bell and its corresponding shadow against a monochromatic background. The studies serve as an important space to work out ideas for his larger-scale paintings, and simultaneously reference the use of folds and shadows in his early photographs.
Accumulator #34.2, 3 Colors Each #009AB2, #F7BA9E, #F86367, 2020
Creased archival pigment print (unique)
20 x 16 inches each
$20,000
John Houck began the Accumulators series in 2013, after the Whitney Independent Study Program encouraged him to integrate his backgrounds in architecture and computer science into his work. The color combinations are generated by a program written by the artist. Once printed, Houck photographs, folds, and rephotographs the images several times, probing questions about memory and perception that continue to define his work today.
Morning Song, 2021
Oil on canvas
20 x 16 inches
$16,000
Houck’s ongoing interest in psychoanalytic theories of memory and the mind permeates his work. Although he is an accomplished photographer, he never paints from photographic images, focusing instead on intentional acts of imagination. Various thought exercises in the studio—such as meditating on objects with an emotional resonance, such as this bell from his grandparents–are integrated into a single composition.
Untitled (Floral Relief 1841), 2022
Gesso and 22k gold leaf on paper
35 x 26 1/2 inches (framed size)
30 x 22 inches (paper size)
$16,000
Stacy Lynn Waddell explores periods described as the “Golden Ages” in history. In a series of florals, she considers 17th century Dutch vanitas and pronkstillevens painting—art work created alongside the birth of global trade, corporate finance, and central banking systems. Constructing images in relief and using traditional gilding processes, her works consider the authorship and idealism of art historical narratives and how they correspond to the economic and political structures of their time. This work recently toured as part of the Weatherspoon Art Museum's excellent exhibition Gilded: Contemporary Artists Explore Value and Worth.
Self-balancing Stars on Skin, 2024
Glue and watercolor on paper
10 1/4 x 18 inches (paper size)
$3,800
Yi Xin Tong is an avid fisherman and a keen observer of the natural world, working in video, sculpture, and drawing. In a lyrical new series of works on paper, he abstracts the patterns and colors found in marine life. This watercolor was inspired by the summer flounder’s ability to dramatically adjust its coloration and the spots on its body to match a wide range of ocean bottoms.
Untitled (flowers), ca. 1990–1995
Watercolor on rice paper
17 1/2 x 20 inches
$6,000
Miguel Ferrando, who passed away at age 38, was a prominent Latinx artist known for his rich intertextuality and his exploration of subjectivity, memory, and the HIV crisis. Rather than presenting the past as a fixed sequence, Ferrando’s works create a continuously reshaped and reimagined landscape. In the 1990s, at a time when many artists were dying of AIDS related causes, Ferrando created a poetic and elegiac series of floral works, painting with ink on rice paper.
Untitled (Sun Series), 1993
Watercolor on paper
8 x 10 inches
$3,500
Ferrando spent most of his childhood in New York City, however, he was born in the Dominican Republic and returned to Santo Domingo several times throughout his life, including for his studies at the Palacio de Bellas Artes. His diligent observations of Dominican culture and landscape were integral to his artistic practice, as in this series of sunsets in which he observed the colors of the sky and changing cloud formations in his signature use of vibrant, tropical color palettes.
Life Score, 2023
Silkscreen on coventry paper
44 x 36 inches
Edition of 10 plus 5 artist's proofs
$7,500
As a musician and artist, Adam Henry has frequently explored the distinctions between sound and silence, often through experimental scores — as in Life Score.
Life Score includes musical staff printed with the instructions: “Breathe in / breathe out / and / continue for / as long as possible”. This work is "performed" by the viewer upon reading and continues until their death — a poetic embrace of life lived in the present moment.
Protocol, 2024
Acrylic and synthetic polymers on linen
9 x 11 inches
$4,500
Adam Henry’s work is often informed by the systems of visual and oral languages, evident in his use of recurring geometries, optical color play, and enigmatic circular references. Recent paintings, such as Protocol, present abstracted, fantastical compositions that refer to land, sky, gravity and time.
Electric Checkers, 2024
Screen print pigment on paper
19 x 21 3/4 inches
$3,800
Electric Checkers employs Liz Collins’s signature use of bold colors and graphic patterning, exemplified here in a unique screen print on paper. Collins discusses her inspiration in a video produced by the National Gallery of Art in concurrence with the exhibition Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction, which travels to MoMA in April of 2025.
Pandemic Flowers, 2021
Colored pencil on paper
23 x 29 inches
$4,500
Liz Collin's language of abstraction alludes to queer and feminist references, sourcing inspiration from interpersonal and environmental forces such as electricity, volatility, connectivity, and energy exchange. Pandemic Flowers depicts a vibrant and imagined garden, created during the COVID-19 lockdown.
