Picture Room is pleased to present Take This Feeling of Doom and Do a Little Dance with It, a dialogic exhibition by Todd Colby & Marianne Vitale. The show includes both individual and collaborative works by Colby and Vitale, who have been working as collaborators since 1993.

About 70 million years ago, when dinosaurs were still walking on the Earth, a series of violent thermo-nuclear explosions took place in a distant galaxy. After a very long travel across vast reaches of virtually empty space, dim light carrying the message about these events has finally reached us. Us, meaning Todd and myself. The origins of our collaboration have everything to do with this “stellar cannibalism” in binary systems in which one relatively cool star loses matter to its smaller and hotter companion. So it’s a back and forth really, of ideas eating ideas and with such instability the result is image and object making and wordplay.

(Marianne Vitale)

Todd Colby stated:

I like to be bold in my work. I like to take chances. I like to feel a little naughty and transgressive. I like tinkering with expectations and shifts in meaning while being clear and concise. I like getting to the edge of convulsiveness, but with a pact to clarity and playful deviousness.

Todd Colby (b. 1962, Minnesota) is a visual artist and poet who works in Northampton, Massachusetts and Brooklyn, New York. Colby has recently presented work at Platform Project Space, Andrew Edlin Gallery, Tanya Grunert Gallery, Legion Arts, and White Columns Artist Registry. He has given readings at DIA Art Foundation, MoMA PS1, The Public Theater, Hudson Opera House, and The Poetry Project, among others. He is the author of seven books of poetry, most recently, It’s Okay to See Ghosts Now (Spiral Editions, 2023).

Marianne Vitale (b. 1973) is an artist living and working in New York City. She graduated with a BFA from the School of Visual Arts, NY (1996). Her practice combines mediums with a focus on sculpture. She has been described as a surveyor, under-taker and soothsayer of hard truths, conveyed poetically. Vitale’s work was recently celebrated as part of the 59th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, 2022, with a large-scale outdoor installation Bottles and Bridges: Advances in Collective Obliteration. Vitale’s work has been exhibited throughout New York including with The Whitney Museum of American Art; The High Line; The Brooklyn Museum; The Journal Gallery; White Columns; Karma; Zach Feuer Gallery; The Sculpture Center; Invisible- Exports; The Elaine de Kooning House, East Hampton; and Performa.