Curated by Robert Storr and Sam Messer
Oct 15–Nov 7
Kate Costello, Matt Johnson, Jurg Lehni, Demetrius Oliver, Traci Tullius
Reception 6–8 pm, Wed, Oct 24
Green Gallery, Yale University School of Art
1156 Chapel St. New Haven, CT

For much of the past two decades artists have luxuriated in an abundance of resources new and old, and in mixing and quite often deliberately mismatching them in exemplary ways. An alternative also exists. Neither a return to the purist traditional concept of "truth to materials" nor to the purist modernist one of "less is more," such an approach tends towards pragmatic invention with whatever may be at hand, and responds imaginatively to the relative quantity or scarcity of it. It can be an art of "muchness" or an "ultra povera" art of extreme spareness, it can be lasting or totally ephemeral. In essence, though, it consists of anything the artist chooses to do while making do with with a given material of their choice. Those anyway are the loosely conceived rules of the game we have asked five artists to play at the Green Hall Gallery where they will come to work in situ for a week. - Robert Storr, Dean Yale School of Art

Artist Bios
Kate Costello, born 1974 in Newfane, Vermont, received her MFA from the University of Southern California, her BFA in 1998 from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and her BA in 1997 from Tufts University. Costello participated in the THING show at UCLA's Hammer Museum in 2005. This summer, she was in a two-person show at Galerie Nikolaus Ruzicska in Salzburg, Austria, and contributed to the Warhol and... exhibition at the Kantor/Feuer Gallery in Los Angeles. Next year, she will have solo exhibitions at the Wallspace Gallery in New York and the Redling Fine Art in Los Angeles. Costello currently lives in Los Angeles.

Matt Johnson, a native of New York City, received his MFA from UCLA and his BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore. He's had one-person exhibitions at Taxter & Spengemann in New York and Blum & Poe in Los Angeles. He contributed to the group show, Uncertain States of America - American Art in the 3rd Millennium, which has been on view in Oslo and New York, and is currently at the Galerie Rudolfinum in Prague. In 2007, he participated in several shows, including all about laughter at the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo and Makers and Modelers at the Gladstone Gallery in New York.

Jürg Lehni, born 1978 in Lucerne, Switzerland. Independent designer, artist and engineer, currently on an artist residency in NYC. Studied interaction design at ECAL, Lausanne. Produces self-initiated work that originates from reflections about tools, the computer and the way we work with and adapt to technology, such as Hektor (with Uli Franke), Scriptographer, http://Lineto.com/ (with Cornel Windlin and Stephan Müller), Rita, Vectorama.org (with Urs Lehni and Rafael Koch).

Demetrius Oliver received a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design, and MFA from the University of Pennsylvania, and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. He has mounted solo shows at the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston, Atlanta Contemporary, P.S.1 MoMA, and Inman gallery, as well as group exhibitions at the Studio Museum in Harlem and Zacheta National Gallery of Art. He was also a Core Fellow at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston's Glassell School as well as an Artist in Residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem.

Traci Tullius, an Oklahoma native, received her BFA in painting from the University of Oklahoma in 1998 and an MFA in New Genres from the University of Kansas in 2001. After attending the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2002, Tullius relocated to New York City, where she is a participant in The Space Program of the Marie Walsh Sharpe Art Foundation. Tullius, a 2007 New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) Fellow in Cross-Disciplinary/Performative Work, is currently Professor of Art at Stern College for Women/Yeshiva University in Manhattan.