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Project Website (with 68 min. multimedia recording): http://slought.org/content/11022/
Joe Amrhein is owner and director of Pierogi. Founded in 1994, Pierogi Gallery is an artist-run gallery located in Williamsburg, Brooklyn—an area now vital to the larger art community because of its concentration of diverse and exciting artists, as well as its innovative gallery scene. Another important aspect of Pierogi are the Flat Files. Since 1994, dealers, critics, curators, collectors and the general public have seen work from the files, which have grown to include the work of over 1000 artists. In addition to the files permanently on view at Pierogi in Brooklyn, a second set of traveling files have been on view at locales including the Museum of Modern Art, NY, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery, Philadelphia, as well as throughout London, Vienna and Austria. Access and participation, on the part of both artists and viewers, is the central idea of the Flat Files. In the spring of 1998 Pierogi inaugurated a limited edition, bi-annual literary and arts journal—Pierogi Press. They are produced in editions of 500 and contain poetry, prose, excerpts from novels and other hybrid texts, as well as reproductions of works on paper. Pierogi Press is in the archive/library of The Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art and The Brooklyn Museum of Art. Joe Amrhein has exhibited his own artwork in solo shows in New York, California, England and Switzerland. Group shows include Ronald Feldman, Exit Art, P.S.1 in Long Island City, NY, Artists Space, and the Los Angeles Museum of Art. Amrhein harnesses his background as a sign painter to engage issues of abstraction and language. The materials he paints on, glass and vellum, besides being traditional surfaces for signs, give him the option to develop the text with a metaphorical content as well —notions of density, fracturing, memory and shadows as ephemera.
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