Dr. Super Igor
Dr. Super Igor
A 4-Channel video installation by Patrick McElnea
Curated by Leeza Meksin
Saturday, October 31 – Sunday, November 8, 2015
Opening Reception:
Friday, October 30, 2015, 6-8pm
Ortega y Gasset Projects is pleased to present a 4-Channel video installation Dr. Super Igor by New York based artist Patrick McElnea, organized by Leeza Meksin in the main gallery. With an opening reception for the artist on Friday, October 30 from 6 to 8pm, the installation will remain on view through November 8th, 2015.
When sickness takes hold, we seek refuge in small white rooms for consultation and instruction. More familiar with our bodies than we are, the doctor knows something that remains illegible to us. In Dr. Super Igor (MD) we are repeatedly diagnosed, turned into a scene of innumerable readings. Gentle, well intentioned, clumsy, and cryptic, Dr. Igor organizes our interior life and feels “invigorated” as he does so.
Borrowing from self-help culture, modernist poetry, and colloquial metaphor, Igor helps us picture our illness in language. When we’re not patients in his examination room, we play therapist to his confessions about life as a doctor, his adamant beliefs and personal insecurities, his longing for physical contact. Performance and painting merge to explore how symptoms are read like marks and how our bodies are consequently marked by diagnoses. Dr. Igor’s scientific imagination confuses empirical evidence and projection, preventative care and intervention, informed consent and blind trust.
Patrick McElnea’s videos, paintings, and collages have been shown at David Nolan, Marc Jancou, and Daniel Weinberg Galleries. Museum shows include the Museo de la Solidaridad Salvador Allende in Santiago, and the Weingart Gallery at Occidental College. A recipient of a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grant, McElnea’s work has explored preventative medicine, memorialization, domesticity, and representations of otherness. He received his MFA from Yale School of Art and BFA from Cooper Union, where he has also taught. He presently teaches experimental video at Vassar College. http://mcelnea.com/
Leeza Meksin is an interdisciplinary artist, who makes paintings, installations, public art and multiples. She received a MFA from The Yale School of Art (2007), a BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2005) and a joint BA/MA in Comparative Literature from The University of Chicago (2000). Meksin has exhibited her work at Regina Rex Gallery (2011, 2014), Airplane Gallery (2014) and Thomas Erben Gallery (2009). She has created site-specific public art installations at Brandeis University (2014), the former Donnell branch of the New York Public Library (2011), and in a National Endowment for the Arts funded project in New Haven, CT (2012). In 2015 Meksin was appointed Assistant Professor of Open Genre at Columbia University School of Art. meksin.com
Ortega y Gasset Projects is a gallery and curated projects space in the Gowanus neighborhood of Brooklyn. Comprised of artists currently living in Connecticut, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, New York, Ohio, and Tennessee, OyG operates a cross-country collective and an incubator for dialogue and artistic exchange. oygprojects.com
RSVP on Facebook
For more information contact Leeza Meksin: leeza.meksin@gmail.com
