Mitchell-Innes & Nash is pleased to announce landscape + object + animal, a solo exhibition of Pope.L in the Chelsea gallery from May 8 through June 19. This will be Pope.L's second solo show with the gallery and his first in the Chelsea space. The works in the show, dating from the 1990s to the present, range across media including video, sculpture, painting and drawing.

The dynamic of any exhibition is the difference between a field of activity, a particular activity in the field and any result stemming from the activity per the animal working the scape, making plans, drawing castles with snout flexed at the heretical, the political, the critical, the magical on the grease of breeze in the mourning air, the tail of the creature coccyx-like almost not a tale at all except for the intention, the goal in every swatted i--

Pieces were chosen to fit a rickety lattice spliced into a spiral set into a box of powder detergent.

'Snow Crawl' is a performance video viewed by looking down a mirrored chimney. 'Cusp' is a group endurance performance in which a set of performers, one by one, hour by hour, don oversize pajamas, an Obama mask and grip a cup brimming with green ink while standing on a dirt mound attempting to remain perfectly still for 75 minutes. Wall works consist of paintings, several with negro ideas, on pvc and vinyl, drawings on found and discarded paper or inscribed with mayonnaise, bas-reliefs of stuffed animals slathered in peanut butter and hung on the wall or sliced open, filled with vegetable oil and set on the floor.

No theme is paramount except via the hoodoo of time, material and staging. Tone: melancholic. Most recent book read: Remarks on Color by Thomas Bernhard and Robert Farris Thompson. –Pope.L

Pope.L was born in 1955 in New Jersey. He currently lives in Lewiston, Maine, where he is a lecturer on theater and rhetoric at Bates College. He has had solo exhibitions at institutions including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Carpenter Center at Harvard University, the Santa Monica Museum of Art, and Kunsthalle Wien. The MIT Press published a monograph to accompany The Friendliest Black Artist in America, his 2002-2004 traveling survey exhibition. His work has been exhibited and performed at The Whitney Museum in New York, Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, Institute of Contemporary Art Philadelphia, and the Renaissance Society in Chicago. Recent exhibitions include Allen Kaprow: YARD at Hauser & Wirth, New York; the DeCordova Biennial in Lincoln, Mass.; and Self as Disappearance 
at Contemporary Art Center, La Synagogue de Delme, France.

Performances of CUSP will take place on Saturday afternoons throughout the course of the show and during the inaugural weekend. A schedule will be posted on the gallery's website. The exhibition will open concurrently with New York Gallery Week, a new initiative presenting 50 solo gallery exhibitions and special programming by galleries around New York City, scheduled for May 7 – 10.