The Armory Show: New York

For the 2021 edition of The Armory Show, James Cohan will present a selection of new and important work by Simon Evans™, Spencer Finch, Gauri Gill, Trenton Doyle Hancock, Yun-Fei Ji, Josiah McElheny, Jordan Nassar, Eamon Ore-Giron, Elias Sime, Alison Elizabeth Taylor, Fred Tomaselli and Grace Weaver. In the 2021 edition of Platform—The Armory Show’s sector for large-scale installations—James Cohan will present Yinka Shonibare's monumental sculpture Material (SG) I, 2019. The fair is open to the public from September 10 through September 12, with a preview on September 9 by invitation.

Ahead of the fair, preview a selection of works from our booth here. 

Following a tradition from western art history, Sketch for a Still Life portrays the subject as an object. It applies the trope of the passive objectified odalisque to a young male playing video games on his couch. This subject is engaged in a simulation of masculinity via the bloodless violence of the first-person shooter. This work is a small gesture to help in the process of unseating the dominion of male subjectivity in art. The subject is also affected by the lockdowns of 2020. Staying home for weeks, seeing no one, staying away from other people is a heroic act. By staying on his couch and not bothering to dress, he is pitching in as everyone must to stop the spread. Strangely, passive masculinity is now a crucial part of a great societal effort. 

This work looks at a subject who is unaware of the viewer and feels they are all alone. Someone who has given up on any pretense of physical presentation so focused on the accomplishment simulation available in the game, the only possible form of adventure in a world that is locked in and shut down. 

In 2015, Gill began collaborating with papier-mâché artists of the Kokna and Warli tribes in Maharashtra, renowned for their sacred masks.  In this series Acts of Appearance, she invited her collaborators to go beyond the confines of their traditional mask making and develop a new set of forms.  Through these vibrant color photographs, Gill tells fictional stories improvised with her collaborator-subjects as they engage in everyday village activities while inhabiting new masks, recalling animals, humans and revered objects that they made expressly for this body of work. The resulting images vacillate between reality and otherworldliness, unfolding in a range of symbolic and sometimes playful scenarios all situated within the backdrop of the surrounding village. 

Incorporating layers of collaged paper, text and found items including detritus from their own home, the new work by Simon Evans™, This American Dollhouse, depicts the cross-section of a house, revealing the clutter, humor, and madness contained within. While certain objects point to the artists specifically, the doll house represents a universal experience: the daily and habitual patterns of life and domesticity, and our fraught relationship with material belongings. As one moves from the top floor to lower levels, the veneer of cleanliness and order—hidden from the eye of the all-seeing security camera—progressively erodes. A masked, costumed man stands in the kitchen with arms outstretched, acting out the frustration and confinement we have all experienced over the past year and a half. 

Gallery artist Yinka Shonibare CBE will present his monumental wind sculpture Material (SG) I, 2019, in the fair's Platform section, Can you hear the fault lines breathing?, curated Claudia Schmuckli. Platform will feature eight works that speak to the urgency of working toward new models of bridging fault lines—societal, historical, or geographical—that are grounded in empathy and understanding.