In the entryway of anonymous gallery, a wall is activated by a single artwork of an emerging artist or art collective. This presentation will run alongside the current exhibition schedule at the gallery, and will remain visible for one month.

This presentation aptly called first impression, will engage our audience and the general public with a single work on view. first impression, aims to share knowledge and insight of carefully considered artists outside of our gallery roster, while also focusing on a need for diverse representation of artists.

Walker Teiser (b. 1990) is an artist who lives and works in New York. He received his BFA in Painting from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2013. His work has been included in exhibitions at MoAB in Brooklyn, and various alternative and artist-run spaces.

The painting Hello is based on a found image of a photocopied card displaying the alphabet of American Sign Language. This particular card had been photocopied so many times that the text had become barely legible. At first glance, the text in the upper right hand corner of the work reads ‘HEL’, but ‘HELLO’ upon closer inspection. The degradation of potential legibility, in bothalphabetical language and pictorial representation, became the starting point for the work. The work also appears to be rendered mechanically in black on a white ground. Closer viewing reveals the work to be painted slowly by hand, and what looked like black and white are in fact shades of purple, green, and pink. Focusing on the center of the line bisecting the painting, subtle variations in tone begin to reveal four areas of color within what appeared to be a uniformly black field. The bits of paint in the bottom half of the painting veer from fields of meaningless marks to glimpses of letters and signs. Just like the disintegrating lettering that it depicts, the piece both reveals and conceals its own making in relation to the viewer’s attention.

On view during Vito Acconci - Here, There .