June 24 – August 7, 2022

Margaret Meehan is a Virginia-based artist whose work is a research-based, multidisciplinary exploration that pulls from film, music, popular culture, folklore, and traditional crafts. She considers the origins of outcasts through their representation. Meehan’s research includes teratology and medicine, ornithology, the esthetics of cuteness, materiality in high and low culture as well as modes of feminist protest. This all stems from her curiosity about the lines that separate what is protected from what is feared and how gendering plays into these expectations. For MODERN BILLINGS XI, she references the Greek myth of Cassandra as a way to give voice to women and femme identified individuals in the world today.

For the inaugural presentation in its newly renovated space, Ulterior Gallery looks to a line from Shakespeare’s Richard II for inspiration: “But time will not permit: all is uneven, And every thing is left at six and seven.” The exhibition seems to ask, when did our world gone sideways into a state of perpetual confusion? The assembled artists, in lieu of an answer, have embraced the best the future has to offer—potential. The program serves as an homage to the gallery’s exhibition history, with a broad range of material and conceptual approaches, including painter Maryam Amiryani, known for sparse still-lifes; the late postwar Japanese painter and sculptor Minoru Yoshida, who created abstractions suggestive of primordial organisms or blooming flowers; and Margaret Meehan, whose multidisciplinary practice explores the societal tendency to assign otherness.
On view May 19–July 9, Ulterior Gallery, 424 Broadway #601. – ARTNEWS May 18, 2022