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Richard Klein
Richard Klein, McDonalds (El Nino), 2024, Found and altered objects assemblage

2024

About the Item

In the mid 1990s Richard Klein started working with found glass objects, including bottles, drinking glasses, ashtrays, and eyeglasses. Initially, Klein rejected any object with commercial or advertising content, but in 2015 he became fascinated with the promotional content that was screen printed on ashtrays from the 1950s, 1960s and early 1970s. This period was before smoking was looked at as being primarily a negative habit, and iconic American businesses, including Howard Johnson’s, International House of Pancakes (iHop) and Holiday Inn, all produced promotional ashtrays printed with their graphic identity. By the time Klein became interested in these objects, the businesses had either ceased to exist, or had changed their logos, and many of their signature buildings, which where examples of classic, “Pop” roadside architecture, has been torn down or repurposed. The artist wanted to connect the glass objects with the business’s sites that were still recognizable and spoke of their history, so he began researching where original buildings still stood. Klein then embarked on a series of road trips to photograph these sites with the intention of combining the photographs with the promotional glass objects. This led him to as far south as Maryland and as far north as upstate New York from his home in Connecticut. In the case of Holiday Inn, it wasn’t their buildings, but their iconic illuminated sign that appeared on ashtrays, so he sought out a standing example of the sign he could photograph. As it turned out all had been removed years before from the hotels' properties and the only working example was indoors at the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan. He did, however, find out that there was one still standing, surprisingly, in Beruit, Lebanon. He found an image of it on the web and used it to make Holiday Inn (Beruit). In 1973 Holiday Inn changed their tagline from “The Nations Innkeeper” to “The World’s Innkeeper” as they expanded overseas, including the Mideast. For the hotel chain it was bad timing: the disastrous Lebanese civil war began in 1975. In the war, the different Lebanese militias involved in the conflict, including the Nasserites, Christian Phalangists, and the Lebanese National Movement engaged in what came to be called “The Battle of the Hotels” where they each occupied a major high-rise hotel in central Beruit. The Phalangists commanded the Holiday Inn, which they used to fire with both light arms and heavier weapons at the militias in neighboring hotels. Klein used the photo of the heavily damaged Holiday Inn sign as I thought it spoke in a curious, offhanded way about American cultural imperialism in juxtaposition with an ashtray that proclaimed Holiday Inn to be “The World’s Innkeeper.” In the work Holiday Inn (Nocturne) the artist utilized a found, 35mm slide of a Holiday Inn sign at night at an unknown location as the basis of the photograph in the work. Richard Klein is a Connecticut-based artist, independent curator and writer. As an artist, he has exhibited widely, including the Neuberger Museum of Art at SUNY Purchase; Caren Golden Fine Art, New York; the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, Sheboygan, WI; Hales Gallery, London; Gavlak Gallery, Palm Beach, FL; deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Lincoln, MA; James Barron Art, Kent, CT; The Portland Institute of Contemporary Art (PICA), Portland, OR; Schoolhouse Gallery, Provincetown, MA; Stephan Stoyanov Gallery, NY; Katonah Museum of Art, Katonah, NY; Brattleboro Museum and Art Center, Brattleboro, VT; Ortega y Gasset Projects, Brooklyn, NY; Exhibit by Alberson Tulsa, OK; Incident Report/Flow Chart Foundation, Hudson, NY; ICEHOUSE Project Space, Sharon, CT; Kenise Barnes Fine Art in Kent, CT and with ODETTA Gallery at the Equity Gallery in New York City.. Reviews of his work have appeared in Two Coats of Paint, Whitehot Magazine, The New York Times, Sculpture Magazine, Art in America, and The New Yorker. In the summer of 2024 he will be the first Artist-In-Residence at Peck Ledge Light, a lighthouse built in 1906 off the coast of Norwalk, Connecticut in Long Island Sound. From 1999 to 2022 he was Exhibitions Director at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, Connecticut. In his more than two-decade long career as a curator he has organized over 80 exhibitions, including solo shows of the work of Janine Antoni, Sol LeWitt, Mark Dion, Roy Lichtenstein, Hank Willis Thomas, Brad Kahlhamer, Kim Jones, Jack Whitten, Jessica Stockholder, Tom Sachs, Elana Herzog. Major curatorial projects at The Aldrich have included Fred Wilson: Black Like Me (2006), No Reservations: Native American History and Culture in Contemporary Art (2006), Elizabeth Peyton: Portrait of an Artist (2008), Shimon Attie: MetroPAL.IS. (2011), Michael Joo: Drift (2014), Kay Rosen: H Is for House (2017), Weather Report (2019), Hugo McCloud: from where I stand (2021), Duane Slick: The Coyote Makes the Sunset Better (2022), and Prima Materia: The Periodic Table in Contemporary Art (2023). His essays on art and culture have appeared in Cabinet magazine and have been included in books published by Gregory R. Miller & Co., Damiani, Picturebox, Ridinghouse, Hatje Cantz, and the University of Chicago Press, among others. Ghost Town is a meditation on abandoned commercial enterprises, the result of an economic or natural disaster, in towns and cities everywhere. The emptiness and decay in the iconic lettering in signs and forlorn window shops are faithfully gathered and recorded by Patrick Sansone in his photographs taken during road trips, a part of his on-going research. The poetics that these left-behind artifacts embody are rendered as this artist navigates his own feelings about this subject. Part homage, part cautionary tale, these works evoke memories of similar signs and locations that many of us have encountered in our own travels and daily life. The messages their images telegraph become an endless scroll of possible narratives. Who were the people that occupied these businesses? Why did the business, and often the entire town fold? The attractive pull in these works is about wistfulness for the remnants of the ghosts of the past in the cruddy, faded colors, peeling paint, and broken glass. Moderne Design of the 1930s-60s used both in the architecture and the lettering on these storefronts and signs, which signaled velocity, ambition, and style. There is a frailty implied in these works, often tinged with a dry sense of humor.
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