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Amy O’Neill
Loaded and Rolling
November 4–December 6, 2014

39 Great Jones Street
New York, NY 10012

Karma is pleased to announce a solo exhibition by Amy O’Neill, titled Loaded and Rolling—a phrase borrowed from a long haul truck driver’s handbook, while alluding to a general visual aesthetic it also humorously conveys the cliché machismo which comes with the territory of 18-wheelers.

The exhibition’s point of departure is a new video, Chrome Palace, Midway Salvage, Riverboat Saloon, a fantasy-like tour of three landscapes, located within 2 miles of each other in rural Pennsylvania. Despite their geographic proximity, the three are incompatible as images—one shows an excess of the new and the others show the discarding of the old. The video draws a cradle-to-grave projection as it wanders around an area not far from where the artist grew up.

Also included in the exhibition is 18 Wheeler Wind Guard and Balancing Bird, 1999–2014, a sculpture that has been stewing in the artist’s studio for the past 14 years. Both works, as well as new paintings, drawings, and prints excavate the ghosts of a physical place.

O’Neill takes a self-professed “Heinz 57” approach to art making. Depending on her subjects, the methods of investigation vary and the material results greatly differ. Her practice is both wide-ranging and intimate, from constructing a graveyard of recreated parade floats as temporary monuments of popular culture, to documenting the taxidermy menagerie displayed in her grandfather’s favorite bar.

Amy O’Neill was born in 1971 in Beaver, PA. She lives and works in New York. Recent solo exhibitions include the Swiss Institute, New York; Sculpture Center, New York; Le Consortium, Dijon; Centre Cultural Suisse, Paris; MAMCO, Geneva; and Wexner Center for the Arts (screening), Columbus, OH.

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