Winter Street Gallery is excited to return for its 2023 programming with a group exhibition entitled PENDULUM, on view from May 6 through June 4. Anchored around James Nares’ influential 1976 Super 8 film of the same name, the presentation brings together four contemporary artists whose works inhabit the atmospheric terrain laid forth in the film. Alongside PENDULUM are newly-created works by Christopher Culver, Anne Libby, and Alix Vernet, as well as two recent large-scale works on paper by Nares. A presiding theme within the exhibition is the suggestive resonance of architecture as a site of memory, creativity, and imagination.

PENDULUM (1976) is a 17-minute black and white film shot at the intersection of Staple Street and Jay Street in New York’s Tribeca neighborhood where Nares lived at the time. It features a large freely-swinging copper globe, suspended from a skybridge between two buildings. Foretelling the sweeping redevelopment the area would experience in subsequent decades, the pendulum resembles a wrecking ball. An undercurrent of the film is the precariousness of this hanging sphere, which is in fact a highly fragile object. Its potential collision with the adjoining buildings would assure its own destruction. Its path through space is therefore a carefully choreographed undertaking, guided by Nares with grace, yearning, and playfulness. Throughout the exhibition, the visual quality of urban architecture, and its metaphorical charge, is explored in a variety of ways by the four artists, all with a shared sense of elegance and mystery.

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James Nares (b. 1953, London) has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions, including at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York and a career-spanning retrospective at the Milwaukee Art Museum in 2019. Her work is included in several prominent public collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, Buffalo, New York; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. A survey of her film and video works were presented in 2008 at the Anthology Film Archives, New York, and in 2011 at the IFC Center, New York. In 2014, Rizzoli published the most comprehensive monograph on Nares’ career to date. Nares has lived and worked in New York since 1974.

Christopher Culver (b. 1985, Miami) is an artist living and working in New York City. Culver received his MFA from The University of Texas at Austin in 2013 where he studied at the School of Fine Arts and School of Architecture. Culver has had solo exhibitions at Chapter NY, New York; The Meeting, New York; A.D. Gallery, New York; Redling Fine Arts, Los Angeles; Yautepec, Mexico City; and Queen’s Nails Annex, San Francisco. His work has been included in group exhibitions at Crèvecoeur, Paris; Tara Downs, New York; Et al. etc., San Francisco; Lomex, New York; and Page Gallery, New York, among others.

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Alix Vernet (b. 1997, Los Angeles) received a BA from UCLA in 2019. Vernet is a New York City-based artist who uses the city as her canvas. Her explorative process often includes molding reliefs on buildings throughout the city, and using an eccentric combination of materials such as latex, clay and cheesecloth to create works that are shadows of the corners of the city they come from. Vernet’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Helena Anrather, New York and Soft Opening, London. She has exhibited in group exhibitions at the Gund Gallery at Kenyon College, Gambier, Ohio; Jeffrey Deitch, Los Angeles; and In Lieu, Los Angeles.

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Anne Libby (b. 1987, Los Angeles) received her BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence in 2009 and her MFA at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York in 2017. She has had recent solo exhibitions at Magenta Plains, New York; Night Gallery, Los Angeles; Ribordy Thetaz, Geneva; The Downer, Berlin; Zak’s Project Space, New York; Violet’s Cafe, Brooklyn; and Metropolitan Structures, Baltimore. Her work has been included in group exhibitions at Soft Opening, London; Josh Lilley Gallery, London; Nina Johnson Gallery, Miami; and the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, among others. She lives and works in Los Angeles.