Ezekiel Honig

About the Exhibition

Taking It Apart is the first solo show in New York City by Ezekiel Honig. It includes works from 2014 to the present, exhibiting a range of directions he has taken over the past years.

Ezekiel Honig’s visual art is influenced by equal parts abstraction, minimalism, constructivism, the sounds of everyday life, and his background in instrumental music production. Using acrylic paint, encaustic, and a variety of everyday mediums (paper, cotton, cardboard, metal…) on wood and canvas, he is interested in tone and ambiguity, and how the arrangement of space or a seemingly tame image can elicit a visceral reaction. The angle of a line, the smudge of a color, the breaking down of a material - tiny movements that can open up large worlds of perception drive ideas and communication into an object.

Honig initially arrived at visual art through sound. The movement into painting and collage began as a means of visualizing music in a concrete and less replicable manner than an album cover. Rather than a direct translation, the relationship from sonic to visual is a loose feedback of influence - in both directions - maintaining a warm, textural mood, a certain rhythm, and in some instances attempting to use visual means to replicate musical patterns - looping, layering, or fragmentation. Distortion, or obscuring something in some way, is an effect that is similar between sound and visual - a means of adding shards of feeling by reducing clarity, exposing hidden details - driving an audiovisual thread.

Gallery Opening Hours

Fridays 2:00-6:00 PM
Saturdays 2:00-6:00 PM
and by appointment
for purchase inquiries please contact us at DelightFactoryNYC@gmail.com

About the Artist

New York City native and founder/manager of the Anticipate and Microcosm music labels, Ezekiel Honig is a multidisciplinary artist whose approach is grounded in a balance of abstraction and concrete immediacy, focused on simplicity, listening, texture, and appreciating the mundane in everyday life. His work in music and visual art has been complementary - sometimes running in parallel, sometimes overlapping directly - always part of a connected thread. His ethos stems from using a personal, individual perspective as a means of connecting to something more universal and vast, and has taken the form of music albums, painting and collage, scores for dance and film, writing, running a music label, and various audiovisual works.

Releasing music since 2003, both on his own imprints and other like-minded labels, Honig has performed regularly in the US and abroad. In a live setting his improvisational approach combines loops and elements from various songs with on-the-fly arrangements, editing and effects. Viewing the recorded material as a constantly shifting body of work leaves space for serendipitous moments and leads to each set being an individualized rework. As a result of this flexibility to tailor sets to the environment, his performances fit in a wide range of venues - from festivals to art galleries, dance floors to inflatable bubbles - and have been known to take the form of location-centered, rhythmic, near-ambient, deep after-hours techno, or heartbeat-driven installation.

Graduating with an MA in Media Studies from The New School in 2010, and running a periodic online curriculum, titled Personal Sound Concepts, led directly to an opportunity to teach music production at The New School  in 2013-2014, which in turn influenced a writing project. In 2014, Honig published his first book, Bumping Into a Chair While Humming: Sounds of the Everyday, Listening, and the Potential of the Personal, an exploration of the sonic potential in everyday objects, spaces, and interactions. With a focus on the benefits of a strong listening practice and search for a personal soundscape, the book took steps toward formalizing and concretizing methods that Honig had exercised instinctually in his own sound productions for years.

From 2014-2015, Honig began working on a collage and sound series titled Object Music. Each piece is made from a small selection of everyday objects, using them to create sound, which is recorded, edited, processed, and arranged into a piece of music. Similar to how the audio is organized, the same objects are physically composed together as a collage on a wooden canvas. Though his painting/collage and audio work are consistently influencing each other, Object Music is a distinct, concrete example of a tightly tethered relationship between visual and sound, the two literally being created from the same material. 

Whether it is creating visual art, composing/producing music, curating a body of work by other artists, or writing about sonic philosophies, the directive is centered in using commonalities across ideas to pull mediums together, to communicate in whatever way is fitting for the moment.

Portfolio site:
https://www.ezekielhonig.com

Art:
https://www.instagram.com/ezekielhonig/

Music label:
https://www.anticipaterecordings.com