FREE!

December 7th - December 9th, 2016

SHRINE is excited to give you free art. At FREE!, we will give away a series of new drawings by Andrew Ondrejcak, who has obsessively documented the shards of a broken mirror found while in residence at Yaddo.

Not just in America, but all across the world, life seems to be hovering at the boiling point and overcome with a fractured and polarized air. Ondrejcak and SHRINE offer a small gift: an exhibition with no intention of profit, but instead, an attempt to connect despite these feelings of brokenness.

The found mirror fragments have been rendered in charcoal and pastel on paper. Rather than considering them as objects destined for the trash, Ondrejcak lovingly observed and documented each piece. Smudges, fingerprints and traces of the artist’s hand are clearly visible, and the sharpness of the original fragments has been negated in translation. By giving away these drawings, Ondrejcak quietly links himself to the viewers. Individuals will leave with a piece of a larger whole- a tangible representation of our communal brokenness and interconnectivity. Like it or not, and no matter what the current climate, we are all in this together.

Andrew Ondrejcak (American, born 1979) is an artist working primarily in live performance. In New York, his work has been produced at the BAM Harvey Theater, The Kitchen, The Public and the Guggenheim Works & Process curated by Robert Wilson. Ondrejcak's experimental performances combine disparate and unexpected elements onto the same stage. In his "Elijah Green" (2016) at The Kitchen, Ondrejcak filled the stage with 15 performers with a wide range of ability, experience and age. Each performer executed seemingly unrelated durational actions (ironing shirts, building a home, watching porn, etc.). Individually, they struggle with loneliness as they search for understanding and love; as a whole, the landscape underscores Ondrejcak's own attempt to find meaning through the interconnectivity of the human experience. Of the performance, critic Helen Shaw wrote, “Andrew Ondrejcak does things with text, image, performers and music. Does that make him a theater-maker? A performance artist? A sculptor with dancing clay? It shouldn't matter how we categorize his Elijah Green; it should be enough that it's gorgeous.”

HOW THIS WORKS: FREE! will be on view during regular gallery hours on December 7th and 8th. On Friday, December 9th, the gallery will open at noon, and a closing reception will be held from 5 to 8 pm. During the event, guests may select a drawing to take home with them. At the end of the reception, (8pm) the drawings will be removed, packed and given to the guests. Alternatively, guests may make arrangements directly with SHRINE for the drawings to be shipped ($10 domestic; $25 international) if they cannot stay until the end of the event. Shrine will ship the drawings on the following day. Limit one drawing per guest.