 |
|
PAST
EXHIBITIONS
|
|
|
|
Horsefeathers
Etc...
November 29 ~ December 22, 2005
Curated by: Thalia Vrachopoulos
Horsefeathers
Etc…is an exhibit that references the Dada spirit in its
re-investigation of irony, absurdist contrasts, and its desecration
of materials-- glassine paper, cotton, or feathers. In its anti-classical
disposition this show relates to the Swiss generated movement of 1916
with Marcel Janco, Hans Arp and Hugo Ball who in the Dada style, created
performance, conceptual and other experimental forms of art negating
conventional creative practices. Horsefeathers features six
international artists whose works in their extrinsic white beauty
appeal to the purist sensibility but that upon closer inspection confound
traditional readings through their underlying critical framework.
Lucile
Bertrand, Migration, 1999 ~ 2005, Bird wingspans,
varying sizes, mixed media. |
Lucile
Bertrand’s Migration installation is
composed of white feather wings with metal spoon features as
tails that can be read as she intended them, utensils to erase
global hunger. In the alternative, the spoons can be seen as
heat containers for drugs that can bring anesthetic oblivion
on the wings of flight. The repetition of these winged angels
throughout the gallery, proposes their ubiquitous existence
while their whiteness alludes to the afterlife and to a paradoxical
purity in their possible underlying assertions. |
| Marie Christine
Katz’s Maps of
Displacement, 2005 installation is comprised of beautiful
components such as gauze, thread, paper, glass and sound, while
its content is fraught with horror. For this project Katz interviewed
displaced persons from the 9/11 catastrophe recording their
relocation experiences up to the time of their return home around
Ground Zero. Katz’s installation is comprised of 24 gauze
strips of varying sizes upon which their journeys are embroidered
and accompanied by a sound track entitled Still There. |
Marie-Christine Katz, Maps of
Displacement,
2001 ~ 2002, 9'x5'x5', Room installation & sound 24 cloths,
thread and glass. |
Rakuko Naito, RN1536-2,
2005, 37 1/4"x37 1/4"x2 1/2", Burnt edge
rolled Mino paper. Wooden box frame. |
Rakuko Naito’s
modular pieces are created on a small scale but her use of
paper involves burning, folding, stacking, tearing, creasing
or somehow eliminating the purity associated with the white
material. And, although her works are about the ordering of
chaos just by the mere acknowledgment of the underlying constitution
of chaotic nature, Naito engages with critical issues to formulate
more than just formal exercises in purity.
|
| The paper
sculptures of Angiola Riva Churchill are for
the most part created on a monumental scale as seen in her Pandora’s
Box, 2005. Churchill’s site-specific installation
for this show is beautiful as an artwork made of delicate Florentine
paper and gauze, folded and worked assiduously into complex
configurations. But, regardless of its seeming exterior beauty,
this work is about the loss of purity in several ways but especially
in its subject matter, Pandora who is usually associated with
the Fall of Man.
|
Angiola Riva Churchill,
Pandora's Box #2, 2005, Mixed media, variable sizes |
Cat, UUHIIWOM, 2005, 4.79"
x 3.48', Cotton woven words with white acrylic paint on barbed
wire lines in iron frame.
|
Cat’s
white cotton wool textual grid Nasty Words, is covered
in clouds of fluffy white cotton making it difficult to read
yet appealing aesthetically. So that initially, the viewer
is entranced by its beauty rather than seeing the work’s
content but once he see realizes it he cannot fail but register
the idea that the words are constructed from barbed wire associated
with pain and violence. So in effect the words become metaphors
for piercing weapons and painful memories juxtaposing verbal
and visual puns to wage war on conventional notions of art
aesthetics as well as on traditional and contemporary constraints
on freedom of expression.
|
| Insook Seol’s installations
underline the non-sensical experimental state of artworks that
seek to upset traditional audience perceptions. She uses plastic
sheeting an unconventional material due to its disposability,
to pun the idea of beauty and aesthetics while rejecting cultural
preconceptions of permanence not only for shock value but also
as a way of offering a new and personal view of the nature of
the world. A number of her recent works have been clustered
around three interrelated themes: the house, traveling bags
and baby supplies. Her pieces are metaphors for the powerful
family ties that are both loving and stifling In the White
House and In the Black House, 2005 are site-specific
installations that continue this theme of family, belonging,
career, and their accompanying challenges. |
Insook Seol, Under the Skin,
2005, Mixed Media
|
|
|
|
Like us on Facebook!