NEW YORK — Sgorbati Projects is pleased to present Maybe I'm Just a Revisionist featuring sculpture, photography, and film by Pooneh Maghazehe, Stephanie Powell, and Bill Santen.

The revisionist reinterprets facts long understood. Evaluating an antecedent past, information and remembrances are reorganized. Critical distances are traveled to produce narratives more true, or, not more true. History becomes increasingly up for grabs and connected to a current, yet equally fluid understanding of presumed clarity. Works in this exhibition circuitously re-examine the movement of objects through time, geography, and memory.

Pooneh Maghazehe exhibits two works that navigate the interdependent and fluctuating values of the familiar and its abstraction. A fragmented decorative plate, glass table, poured rubber, and limestone are symbols specific to the lexicon of design, and subject to preconceptions of taste, class, and history. These objects act as anchors between tangible experience and the recollections of those experiences.

Stephanie Powell examines the relationship of objects and materials corresponding to familial and cultural histories. Black lacquer—associated with both traditional Japanese lacquerware and the faux-Oriental sexiness of popular 1980’s American furniture—covers military and rescue blankets. In one work, it is paired with materials referential to classic Hollywood Western films: tumbleweed and fool’s gold. A photograph depicts personal daily self-help pronouncements realized only by the artist's skill at throwing Ninja stars.

For two separate short films, visual artist and musician Bill Santen takes as starting points Vito Aconcci’s performance Pryings (1971) and a recording by his grandmother, recounting the lives and deaths of family pets over the course of 91 years. Each work employs a nostalgia that is as equally designed as it is authentic.

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