New York, October, 2001: Mitchell-Innes & Nash, is pleased to present a solo exhibition for Brooklyn-based contemporary artist Stephen Sollins. The exhibition, Stephen Sollins: Dwelling, will be on view at the Madison Avenue gallery from January 17 through March 2, 2002. This is the artist’s inaugural solo show with Mitchell-Innes & Nash. Two ambitious bodies of work from the past year exploring the artist’s fascination with communication, emotional containment and inhabited spaces comprise the exhibition. The first, "Range Drawings," are a series of 10 large-scale multi-paneled drawings in which obsessively worked black or white fields cover sets of pages and uncut page-proofs from a mail-order camping and sporting goods catalogue. The found line drawings from the catalogue (small clusters of tents or rafts) are left to inhabit vast, silent fields. The pages of the graphite drawings are heavily worked with dense crosshatched pencil lines resulting in a near-reflective, active surface. For the white drawings, the buried information of the catalogue pages reverberates through the lines of correction fluid which trace and cover them. The deceptively simple methods used to produce the "Range Drawings" result in highly articulated surfaces which reward attention while attempting to deny information. The artist has described the result as "exchanging the noise of the world for the information of silence." The suppression of information is made explicit with the second part of the exhibition, the "Covers" series, which will include the major large-scale piece "Untitled (Sound of Music)" and an editioned multi-part sculpture. The "Covers" are made by tracing the whole and half rests from measures of sheet music of various 20th century "American standards" (such as "Look For the Silver Lining" and "All the Things You Are") onto matching horizontal sheets of blank Mylar. The resulting drawings, spare patterns of black dashes on pure white fields, give visual form to the structure of silence. The clear resin sculptures, the "Mutes," which accompany these drawings are cast to scale from trumpet and trombone mutes. Their various conical shapes become physical manifestations of both silence and sound. Sollins documents the silences which lie just underneath everyday experience. Through the suppression of content, the artist seeks an emotional impact: the silence between notes of music, the distance between people. Sollins is a recipient of this year’s New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship and has previously been included in several museum exhibitions and art fairs, including shows at the Bronx Museum of the Arts, The Drawing Center, and The Armory Show. An opening night reception for the artist will take place at Mitchell-Innes & Nash on January 17, 2002 from 6 to 8pm. Gallery hours are 10:00am to 5:00pm, Tuesday through Saturday. A fully illustrated catalogue with an essay by Beth Finch will be available through the Gallery. The public can preview the exhibition at www.miandn.com or call Robert Grosman at the Gallery at (212) 744 7400. For press information or to request slides, please contact: Stacy Bolton, tel: (212) 721-5350, fax: (212) 721-0780, email: sbstul@aol.com