NEW YORK — GHOSTMACHINE is pleased to present Nice Meats, an exhibition of works by Kate Bancroft, Lauren Cohen, and Tamara Kostianovsky. The exhibition is on view from March 8 through March 30, 2024.
Nice Meats brings together a symbiotic collection of work by Bancroft, Cohen, and Kostianovsky, tied together by the cultural significance that meat and its consumption have on the everyday. Transforming the gallery into a butcher shop domain, the exhibition invites viewers to engage in the psychological, humorous, and whimsical aspects of each artist’s practice. While the clichéd butcher connotes themes of brunt masculinity, the exhibited female artists turn the stereotype on its head through wit and introspection, while employing oil, ceramic, and textiles. Each artist brings the body into the subject, both directly and implicitly, prodding the viewer to question the impact that food has on us all. Nice Meats presents an uncanny interpretation of the butchery, establishing a meaty gathering space for conversations around societal norms, individuality, and shared experience.
Kate Bancroft’s paintings, all oil on linen, depict her features reflected in objects of consumer culture as psychological self-portraits/still lives. The five paintings on view situate the self within kitchen and tablescapes, all with meat serving as the focal point. The artist stares from a knife on the chopping block, her eyes gaze out at us while being poured out of a gravy boat, and her face sets a backdrop for a vanitas of raw chicken. This selection of Bancroft’s work walks us through the intricate process of food preparation, from the initial cut into raw meat to adding the final garnish at the table.
Lauren Cohen utilizes the semi-absurd in her practice: personifying charcuterie, ceramifying smut magazines, transforming her own persona into desperately-single lone men. For Nice Meats, Cohen created Butcher Booth, a display overrun by her anthropomorphized ceramic renditions of various provisions. We are invited to look in, emulating the act of consumer, picking out which piece calls out to us. Accompanying the display case, Cohen’s paintings are installed, depicting women in cahoots with hot dogs—embracing, oggling, sucking, and bound together. Pulling influence from everyday observations and reflections on her own familial relationships, her gendered fictional characters are condensed into still objects, ready for reflection and consumption.
Tamara Kostianovsky repurposes garments, mostly from her wardrobe, into visceral animal carcasses hanging from the ceiling. Here, a large bird is suspended by a rope and split open revealing a glimpse of its fleshy innards. Its feathered wings, rendered in floral fabric, wilt down, looming above the viewer. Forever stuck in limbo, it reminds us of its former majestic state. Kostianovsky’s work gives new life to forgotten materials, all while prompting us to consider the physicality of the body and our understanding of being.
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Kate Bancroft is an artist based in New York City. She holds an MFA in Painting from The Slade School of Fine Art, University College London, and a BFA in Painting and Art History from the College of Fine Arts at Boston University. Her work has been exhibited at Long Story Short, NY; Gaa Gallery, Wellfleet, MA; and Massey Klein Gallery, NY. She has previously been an artist in residence at The Slade School of Fine Art and Camden Arts Centre, London, and CCA Andratx, Spain.
Lauren Cohen holds a BFA from California College of the Arts, San Francisco, and an MA from Royal College of Art, London. Her work has been exhibited at Felix Art Fair presented by Voloshyn Gallery, Los Angeles; Westbeth Gallery, NY; Wassaic Project, NY; Spring/Break Art Show, NY; The Museum of Modern Art Department of Film, NY; Van Der Plas Gallery, NY; Trestle Gallery, NY; Andrew Edlin Gallery, NY; The Maine Jewish Museum, Portland; Patricia Sweetow Gallery, San Francisco; The di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art, Napa, CA; The London Institute of Contemporary Art; The Blyth Gallery, London; Goldsmiths College of London; and Brigitte Mulholland, Paris (forthcoming). She has been an Artist in Residence at MacDowell, NARS (New York Art Residency and Studios), The Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture, The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, and MASS MoCA. Previous juried exhibitions include Bloomberg New Contemporaries, The Catlin Guide, and Saatchi New Sensations.
Tamara Kostianovsky is a Latinx artist who has been exhibited at venues such as The Baker Art Museum, Naples, FL; Newport Art Museum, RI; Kunsthalle Trier, Germany; Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, Salt Lake City; Denver Botanic Garden, CO; Ogden Contemporary, UT; Les Franciscaines Art Center, France; Smack Mellon, NY; El Museo del Barrio NY; The Jewish Museum, NY; Nevada Museum of Art; Fuller Craft Museum, MA, and many others. She has received distinguished awards such as a Guggenheim Fellowship and grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts and the Pollock-Krasner Foundation. Her work has been reviewed in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, Village Voice, Marie Claire, La Repubblica, El Diario New York, Colossal, and Hyperallergic, among others. Residencies include Yaddo, Wave Hill Gardens, LMCC, Socrates Sculpture Park, and Franconia Sculpture Park. Kostianovsky received a BFA from the National School of Fine Arts, Buenos Aires, Argentina, and an MFA from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia.