Winter Street Gallery is excited to return for its 2023 programming with a group exhibition entitled Pendulum, on view from May 6 through June 4. Anchored around James Nares’ influential 1976 Super 8 film of the same name, the presentation brings together four contemporary artists whose works inhabit the atmospheric terrain laid forth in the film. Alongside Pendulum are newly-created works by Christopher Culver, Anne Libby, and Alix Vernet, as well as two recent large-scale works on paper by Nares. A presiding theme within the exhibition is the suggestive resonance of architecture as a site of memory, creativity, and imagination.

Pendulum (1976) is a 17-minute black and white film shot at the intersection of Staple Street and Jay Street in New York’s Tribeca neighborhood where Nares lived at the time. It features a large freely-swinging copper globe, suspended from a skybridge between two buildings. Foretelling the sweeping redevelopment the area would experience in subsequent decades, the pendulum resembles a wrecking ball. An undercurrent of the film is the precariousness of this hanging sphere, which is in fact a highly fragile object. Its potential collision with the adjoining buildings would assure its own destruction. Its path through space is therefore a carefully choreographed undertaking, guided by Nares with grace, yearning, and playfulness. Throughout the exhibition, the visual quality of urban architecture, and its metaphorical charge, is explored in a variety of ways by the four artists, all with a shared sense of elegance and mystery.