Greene Naftali Gallery will present a sculptural installation by Scott Lyall, opening Friday, January 26th and continuing through Sunday, March 10th. This marks the first one-person exhibition for the artist, who lives and works in Brooklyn and Toronto, Canada. Lyall's work has been shown in various exhibitions within the United States, and was most recently included in the Klaus Biesenbach curated "Club Berlin" project during the Venice Biennale in 1995. A private reception for the artist will be held Friday evening, January 26th from 6-8pm.

The current exhibition is invested with the social space of a warehouse dance scene, a subject which was chosen because it typifies the mediated environment of musical connoisseurship and style described by Lyall as "one of the last functioning examples of a modernist art world". The "warehouse scene" is defined as the point where a social and musical event "takes place" in the visual, a point where the "becoming of pictures" is repetitively and eagerly performed by disparate actors. Although the scene is primarily a kind of symbolic space, centered on the selection and dissemination of mixed musical fragments, music itself has been treated by the artist as a paradoxical pictorial element, one which appears nowhere in the visual but nonetheless causes the (proto-) pictorial space to appear.

The work is derived from transposed computer drawings, each depicting elementary architectural views of a DJ booth and dance floor. The drawings were manipulated through a sequential application of musical and pictorial concepts, and were then mapped in three-dimensions using a variety of computer imaging applications. The final sculptural work is a condensed hybrid derived from the mixture of these drawings, in which a figura0ve aspect is re-introduced through the presence of standard DJ equipment and a variety of other elements.

"To be a scene, the sculptural work has to be rigorously mixed, or constructed, in spatial terms. But a scene also
requires that bodies be present -- not as viewers or subjects (since the work already has both) but as actual
physical bodies, a definition of flesh which is partly, but only partly, exchangeable for traditional painting and
sculptural materials. It's largely a question of drawing in people, and the verb "to draw" should be used in both
the major senses it can bare."

The installation raises questions about the relationship between pictures, built environments, and other limited objects, and addresses the difficult problem of framing shifting social realities within the visual arts.

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The Gallery will also present a special project entitled Room curated by Daniel Carello and Pedro Gomez. The artists include Daniel Carello, Stephen Carter, Ebon Fisher, Pedro Gomez, Ann Kugler, and Michael Zahn. The installation will open January 26th and continue through February 11, 1996.