Ed Flood Floaters & Fins, 1973 - 1979

Press Release

Opening Friday, December 12th, 5:00-8:00pm

Corbett vs. Dempsey is pleased to announce Floaters & Fins, an exhibition of historical work by Ed Flood. This is the second major show of the artist at CvsD.

In the late 1960s, Flood (1944-1985) was associated with the Chicago Imagists. He showed at the Hyde Park Art Center with the Non-Plussed Some, the same exhibition group that debuted Ed Paschke and Sarah Canright. By the early 1970s, Flood and Canright (who were married) moved to New York, where Flood’s concept began to shift. This exhibition spotlights the new and very different work he made between 1973 and 1979, marking changes in aesthetic, materials and medium. The earliest of these works continue Flood’s Imagist mode, featuring box constructions with multiple layers of Plexiglas, on which squiggling aquatic forms are back-painted, dispersed in the space like floating paramecia. In 1975, Flood began to think of the room of exhibition as the box, and he moved the shapes gradually out into the space, in the process making them into sculptures.

The exhibition will feature a group of small models from ’76, shelf scale, that show how he’s reconsidering the way these interlaced fin-like shapes negotiate the relationship between floor and wall. By decade’s end, Flood was constructing wall-hanging fins, arranged in clusters, thickly painted, sometimes in bright colors. In aggregate, like schools of fish, these works suggest tandem motion. In the same period, Flood painted a series of related watercolors on handmade paper. The show surveys this extraordinary and lesser-known period in Flood’s tragically short career, with superb examples of each genre, including the boxes, the models, the fins and the watercolors.

Floaters & Fins, 1973-1979 is accompanied by a 48-page catalog, with a short essay by John Corbett.