Please join us for a discussion between artist Adam McEwen and poet and cultural critic Wayne Koestenbaum, presented with Petzel Gallery. Following McEwen’s recent solo exhibition (“I Think I’m in Love”, Aspen Art Museum, 2017), the conversation will use Koestenbaum’s catalog contribution – a strange poetic/essayistic text in its own right – as a grounds for a conversation about art-making and objecthood. Through the lens of humor and/or melancholy, their talk will touch on a number of themes as they relate to McEwen’s artistic production; representation and the gaze of objects, death, machines and the machined, as well as the way that language - a “magical system of correspondences” - is both a mediated and mediating force.

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Adam McEwen, a New York–based British artist. Once employed to write obituaries for the London Daily Telegraph, he began producing fictional obituaries of living subjects such as Bill Clinton, Kate Moss and Jeff Koons. His recent sculptural works include objects such as a life-size coffin-carrier fabricated from solid graphite (Bier, 2013) and deployed airbags cast in concrete (2015).

Wayne Koestenbaum has published eighteen books of poetry, criticism, and fiction, including Notes on Glaze, The Pink Trance Notebooks, My 1980s & Other Essays, Hotel Theory, Best-Selling Jewish Porn Films, Andy Warhol, Humiliation, Jackie Under My Skin, and The Queen’s Throat (a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist). He has had solo exhibitions of his paintings at White Columns (New York), 356 Mission (L.A.), and the University of Kentucky Art Museum. His first piano/vocal record, Lounge Act, was issued by Ugly Duckling Presse Records this year. He is a Distinguished Professor of English, Comparative Literature, and French at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York City.