Three Stories Deep
new work by Antonio Serna
November 7th - December 19th, 2007
silent opening: Wednesday November 14th, 6-8PM
New York Public Library
Mulberry Street Branch
10 Jersey Street
(between Mulberry Street and Lafayette)
New York, NY 10012
Google map: 10 Jersey Street.
Press release:
The title of the exhibition Three Stories Deep, refers to both a physical location and a collection of 3 themes that the artist is investigating through painting and photography. The installation at the New York Public Library Mulberry Street Branch runs from November 7th through December 19th.
The first story Three Stories Deep: Phantom Limb, an installation of 12 paintings from which the show takes it’s name, started with the idea of random arrangement, of construction with no real purpose. This piece has evolved to include a narrative originating with a phantom limb as the author. At the end of this narrative sits a lone painting, a teetering stack of six bricks, which brings to mind Carl Andre's Manifest Destiny (1986), while evoking the spirit of the infinity monkey theorem in a more haunting and sinister way. 
It is in this way that the work contrast the random wastefulness with the optimism embodied in the emergence of new art movements. How many more strokes on a canvas must the phantom limb make in order to produce another work, another monument, to over shadow the rubble and destruction left in it's path? How many more bombs must be dropped to carve out a region as strong as the Roman Empire at its height?
While the painting installation Three Stories Deep ends with a reference to a historical artwork, the 2nd story Poke Fun, 
a group of photographs, began with another. The seed for this work was Cindy Sherman's Untitled #299 (1994), but instead of wearing the grimace and esotropic eye as a mask from which to look through and reflect upon, it is simplified and set aside as a pseudo-modernist sculpture, an escapist method of self-induced numbness and detachment, simply a condition of our times at a time of war.
The 3rd and final unfinished story is like the third floor beneath this library: it has the potential to exist but is still in its raw state. The painting is entitled Skin for a Male Commando. Who is he? Where is he going? Google “skin for male commando” if you are curious, and while you are at it Google “three stories deep” too. These are some directions as to where this might be headed.
NYPL Mulberry Branch is located at 10 Jersey Street, NYC, NY 10012. The library is open Mondays and Wednesdays from 12pm to 8pm, Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays from 10am to 6pm, and Saturday 10am to 5pm. The library is closed on Sundays.left inset:
Carl Andre, Manifest Destiny, 1968.
Bricks. ~3" x 9" x 4'
Donald Judd Foundation, 101 Spring St., SoHo, New York
Monkey Typing, date ?
Public domain illustration of wiki's entry for the infinite monkey theorem.
top inset:
Cindy Sherman, Untitled #299, 1994.
The Goetz Collection, Munich, Germany
