Salon Acme 2019

Gildar Gallery is delighted to participate in Salon Acme No. 7 with a project by Stephanie Kantor. In a curiously devotional installation, the Philadelphia based artist presents a room within the historic building  in Mexico City dedicated to a series of male swimmers of a certain age. Rather than the young, sexually available, and often female, bodies offered-up in familiar bather paintings, these aging men float along, eyes downcast or looking off, with expressions that range from determined to confused. They’re out there looking for something. Beneath each of the painted aquatic wanderers, shrine-like arrangements fan-out on the ground. Made up of precariously stacked ceramic vessels and sea shells imprinted with the artist’s thumbs, an oddly pious atmosphere takes shape. Memorialized by the labor of a young woman, what’s become of these questing men, and what they hoped to find wading in the water, nonetheless, remains murky.



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Stephanie Kantor (b. 1985, Pittsburgh, PA, USA) is a visual artist who creates objects and images as both plausible and clearly constructed artifacts of personal and broader cultural histories. Kantor creates installations that include ceramic sculpture, furniture, papier-mâché, painting, and textiles. She received an MFA from University of Colorado Boulder (2015) and BFA from Penn State University (2009). Kantor was a Black Cube Nomadic Museum Fellow in 2016 and has completed residencies at Belger Crane Yard Studios, RedLine Contemporary Arts Center, and Bunker Projects. She has exhibited nationally at Paragraph Gallery (MO), Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art (KS), Sala Diaz (TX), Bunker Projects (PA), Gildar Gallery (CO), and Calico Gallery (NY). Kantor currently lives in Philadelphia and is the Zeldin Fellow at The Clay Studio.