NEW YORK, NY.- For Roxy Paines fourth solo exhibition at James Cohan Gallery, the gallery presents the artists new large-scale installation Distillation (2010). A single continuous piece, the artwork begins at the gallerys front door and pierces its walls to travel all the way through the space to the back offices. The sculpture is Paines newest addition to his stainless steel Dendroid series, which includes Maelstrom, featured on the Metropolitan Museum of Arts Roof Garden in 2009. Roxy Paines monumental new work Distillation becomes a metaphor for the artist’s mental process. Paine re-examines alchemical methods to create a meditation on mystical industrialism. If the process of distillation is an attempt to find purity, the sculpture Distillation demonstrates the impossibility of that goal. An apt analogy can be found in Hilary Mantels writing on the alchemic practice in her 1989