Press Release (Cycle VI)

September 27th - October 18th, 2023

Storage
52 Walker Street
4th Floor
Tribeca, New York 10013

On this occasion, we celebrate the ambitious, communal, and build-it-yourself nature of the founding of Storage with Press Release (Cycle VI), a presentation by Jeff Way (b. 1942) and Carolyn Oberst (b. 1946), two Tribeca-based artists who share a similar ethos.

In Press Release (Cycle VI), archival and recent works by Jeff Way and Carolyn Oberst are curated to examine modalities of labor and transcendence within the historical canon of painting. The exhibition also explores 50+ years of camaraderie between Oberst and Way, who have cohabited in their Walker St loft since the 1970s, but have found disparate modes of artistic exploration.  Similar in the practices of Oberst and Way are references to a blue-collar ideology of making, as they both experiment with the notion of the ‘frame’. Oberst restores discarded frames before painting in and on them, while Way utilizes the explosive gesture of a chalk line tool, often found in carpenters’ work boxes. 

Press Release (Cycle VI) demonstrates Storage’s commitment to centering archival and contemporary works by intergenerational artists pushing the boundaries of artistic traditions. As we celebrate one year since our gallery's opening at 52 Walker St. in September 2022, Storage has held an ongoing, inaugural survey exhibition called Press Release with an organic rotation of artworks. 

• Events

  Opening Reception
  6-8pm
  Friday, September 27th

  Artists Talk
  6-8pm
  Wednesday, October 11th

  Tribeca-based artists Jeff Way (b. 1942) and Carolyn Oberst (b. 1946) led by Charlotte Meyer, Director of the Rema Hort Mann Foundation will be discussing the history of Downtown New York art scene 1960’s-2000’s. Notions of space making, economics, and intellectual movements would be explored as we celebrate our 1-Year Anniversary in Tribeca.

• Jeff Way

  Jeff Way (b. 1942) has lived and worked in the Tribeca neighborhood of New York City since 1969. After his arrival in New York, Way was featured in the Whitney Museum of American Art at their 1973 Biennial curated by Marcia Tucker, and again the following year in a solo exhibition. Since then, Way’s work has been included in various exhibitions at the Contemporary Arts Museum (Houston, TX), the New Museum of Contemporary Art (New York, NY), the Institute of Contemporary Art (Philadelphia, PA), as well as other museums and galleries. Way’s works have been added to the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum through a gift by Larry Aldrich, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Denver Art Museum, the New Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Cincinnati Art Museum.

  Way began his Chalk Line Painting series in the late 1960s to explore the use of the grid through pigment and acrylic medium. These paintings are constructed using raw pigment snapped onto the canvas in single lines that layer together to form dimensional shapes. He returns to his use of the grid in his most recent series of paintings, Eccentric Squares. Composed again with his distinctive lines, Way uses intersecting color to create a sequence of bold, de-centered squares. The paintings present an immediate dichotomy between the flatness of the surface and the depth of colors and forms on the constructed grid.

• Carolyn Oberst

  Carolyn Oberst (b. 1946) is a visual artist whose colorful work is influenced by the different, yet interconnected worlds around her. Whether it is the current, contemporary world, the world she creates for herself in her studio, or her internal world of dreams, intuitions, and memory, these aspects infuse her work. Oberst is an interdisciplinary artist, working across painting, drawing, mixed media, wood relief, and video animation. Currently, Oberst’s focus has returned to the directness of oil paint on canvas. Drawing is an important part of her process, as it provides the foundation from which her image making always begins.