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26/6/2010

Seven Exhibitions

The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield

Rackstraw Downes
Under the Westside Highway

The exhibition features Rackstraw Downes’s three-part painting, Under the Westside Highway at 145th Street: The North River Water Pollution Control Plant, and the many sketches and preparatory works which were part of the process of its creation. The work depicts a space which the artist describes in his journal as “very ‘ancient Rome’; Piranesi-like … with enormous columns, and some nice curves …” Typical of Downes’s work, it is an in-between space, utilitarian and majestic; a manmade space next to the Hudson River, which quietly gleams behind the trees, stage left.

The paradox of Downes’s work is that at first glance, to our twenty-first-century eyes, it appears to be photo-realistic. Nothing could be further from the truth. This “snapshot” of a particular location at a particular moment was in fact meticulously crafted over a year and a quarter. On site. With no camera involved.

Downes works up his compositions through repeated observation and study as he makes sketches, drawings, preliminary paintings, and ultimately, the final canvases. What appears to be a moment in time has been constructed by the artist—even the joggers and cyclists carefully rendered from observation—even if that means the jogger must be asked to run by again and again, until her form is captured and the composition improved.

Downes keeps a journal in which he records his working process, thoughts on art, exhibitions, books, and his personal life. The exhibition brochure will feature excerpts of his journal which document the creation of Under the Westside Highway at 145th Street: The North River Water Pollution Control Plant, and a related painting of the George Washington Carver housing project at 103rd Street and Park Avenue, which is also on view.
-Harry Philbrick, museum director

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Fritz Haeg
Something for Everyone

Something for Everyone, Haeg’s exhibition at The Aldrich, includes five projects. One is an Edible Estate on the front lawn of the Museum that is being tended by the staff. For the artist, the ultimate goal of a garden like this is to activate the front lawn as a social space, where the gardeners interact with the passersby while creating new relationships with the environment and the plants and animals.

Reconnecting people with people, and people with plants and animals, is at the core of all the projects in this exhibition. The Animal Estate at The Aldrich consists of a series of homes designed specifically for the flying squirrels that lost their habitat when the Museum’s large ash tree died and was removed from the Sculpture Garden.

Through the Sundown Salon, where a local resident/family will on September 5 relocate their living room furniture to The Aldrich’s atrium, and then organize and host a series of salon gatherings at their home; the Sundown Schoolhouse, where a series of intimate workshops and classes will take place in a geodesic tent on the Museum's front lawn; and the Dancing Boardwalk, which facilitates the exploration of movement, direction, and gesture on a low wood platform installed in the rear Sculpture Garden, Haeg is creating simple structures that encourage meaningful human activity and social exchanges.

All these projects are integrated into the existing landscape and architecture of the Museum with very simple and inexpensive materials, mainly wood. However, the human, animal, and plant activity around them is highly complex. These projects are meant as models that inform our vision for a more sustainable, interconnected, and grounded future. They are models that anyone can implement at home with modest means—starting simply in their own front yard.
Mónica Ramírez-Montagut, curator.

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KAWS

This first solo museum exhibition of the work of Brooklyn-based artist and designer Brian Donnelly, a.k.a. KAWS, includes his most recent paintings, sculptures, and drawings, as well as a survey of his iconic street art, apparel, product and graphic designs.

KAWS’s first aesthetic influences came from skateboarding, as did his familiarity with New York City. Around 1991, he started marking his name in different areas of New Jersey and Manhattan. By the time he finished high school, he was mostly focused on graffiti and started intervening on advertising billboards. While exploring new strategies and locations for his work, he obtained a tool for opening bus shelter advertisement boxes. This allowed KAWS to seize the posters, integrate his work, and then replace them. He added an inflated skull with crossed bones and X-ed-out eyes; sometimes the skull was part of a serpentine-looking body that wrapped around the models, a blend that was humorous and daring. Word got around, and when it came to the point where the posters were pulled down and collected almost as soon as KAWS had replaced them, he decided to move on. Next he channeled his creativity into his studio practice, as well as products he developed and distributed on his own and in his boutique in Tokyo, OriginalFake, in partnership with Medicom Toy.

Most recently, KAWS has been exhibiting the art he has been making as a daily practice for some time. His new paintings and sculptures reflect the wit, irreverence, and even affection that he inflicts upon the infamous and iconic entertainment and marketing characters that he loves/hates. KAWS’s characters are highly charged, humorous and yet bittersweet. Although they are recognizable by and accessible to everyone, ultimately they both serve and criticize contemporary consumer culture.
Mónica Ramírez-Montagut, curator.

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Beryl Korot
Text/Weave/Line—Video, 1977-2010

Beryl Korot: Text/Weave/Line—Video, 1977-2010 will open at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum on June 27, 2010, presenting a diverse body of work by one of the most important video art innovators of our time.
Curated by Aldrich director Harry Philbrick, the exhibition will mark Korot’s most extensive museum project to date, featuring six never-before-seen works created since 2003, which reflect the artist’s interest in how our communication tools mirror the way we present and receive information.

The Aldrich exhibition will present Korot’s seminal multi-channel video work, Text and Commentary, which premiered at the Leo Castelli Gallery in 1977, and also debut her latest body of poetically expressive and hypnotic work. This includes a series of quieter works that build on her earlier technical and conceptual achievements, but expand the subject matter to include the passage of time, nature, and portraiture.

A notable shift centers on two unconventional companion video portraits. Korot rediscovers Florence Nightingale—the celebrated nineteenth-century nursing pioneer who revolutionized the care of injured soldiers during the Crimean War—and Etty Hillesum, a young Jewish-Dutch writer who documented her experiences for a year while in a transit camp in Holland in the early 1940s. The works reflect the lives of these remarkable women by conveying thoughts drawn from their writings. Each video features Korot’s signature woven backgrounds, inspired by the content highlighted in the documents, into which she integrates very slow rhythmic falling words creating a new sense of reading and time.

Curator Harry Philbrick points out, “Korot was the co-founder and co-editor of the ground-breaking 1970s publication Radical Software, the first magazine to explore the notion of alternative communication systems and formats for conveying information. Today, when new media is an imperative in our connected world, she continues to create fresh work that illuminates the structure of communication.”

Beryl Korot has pioneered video art since the early 1970s. She was co-editor of Radical Software (1970), the first publication to discuss the possibilities of the new video medium. Her first multiple channel works (Dachau, 1974 and Text and Commentary) were seen at such diverse venues as The Kitchen (1975), Leo Castelli Gallery (1977), Dokumenta 6 (1977), and the Whitney Museum (1980), among others. Dachau, 1974 is in the Kramlich Collection at the Tate Modern. Her painted text-based handwoven canvases in an original language were exhibited in 1986 at the John Weber Gallery and in 1990 at the Carnegie Museum (Points of Departure). Two video/music collaborations with Steve Reich (The Cave, 1993, and Three Tales, 2002) brought video installation art into a theatrical context. Both works continue to be performed and have been installed, apart from live performances, at such venues as the Whitney Museum, the Carnegie Museum, the Reina Sofia, the Dusseldorf Kunstverein, and ZKM. Since 2003 she has been creating a new body of video and print work which will be seen at The Aldrich Museum for the first time. She is a Guggenheim Fellow and has received numerous grants for her work from the NEA, NYSCA, and most recently from Anonymous Was a Woman.

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Gary Lichtenstein
35 Years of Screenprinting

Master printer and Connecticut native Gary Lichtenstein has collaborated with over ninety artists during the course of his thirty-five-year career. This exhibition brings together forty-eight screenprints from the over eight hundred he has created, focusing on works made since 2004.

Lichtenstein’s role as an artist in his own right has brought an innovative perspective to his craft. His innate ability as a colorist, together with his belief in spontaneity and acceptance of what others would consider accidents or mistakes, has defined his studio. Multiple trial proofs and color variations are the norm, and Lichtenstein has no concern about how many screens it will take to successfully resolve an image. It is not unusual for a print from his studio to have fifteen or twenty colors, and there are examples of prints with forty or more. In the past decade, Lichtenstein has also begun to experiment with unique, large-scale screenprints on canvas, blurring the boundary between painting and printmaking.

Installed in the center of the gallery is a print-drying rack that contains one-of-a-kind printer’s proofs, working proofs, and other examples of materials from Lichtenstein’s studio that reveal the experimental nature of his process. The exhibition also includes a video made by Lichtenstein’s longtime friend, filmmaker Elliot Caplan. Filmed during the recent production of one of Robert Indiana’s Hope prints, it wonderfully captures both the personality of the printer and his process.
Richard Klein, exhibitions director

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Gina Ruggeri
Immaterial Landscape
until August 29, 2010

Gina Ruggeri’s project for The Aldrich is conceived as a constellation of large-scale paintings on Mylar, cut out and attached flush to the Museum’s walls. The works depict imaginary landscape fragments that merge seamlessly with the gallery’s surfaces, activating the space. Surrounding the viewer from floor to ceiling, the images are rendered with dramatic spatial intensity, and take into account the viewer’s physical viewpoint. Trompe l’oeil caverns seem to puncture or erode some walls, while voluminous plumes of smoke and drifting clouds emerge from others. These visionary fragments of nature test the boundary between reality and artifice as they lure the viewer into their believable yet impossible illusions.

Ruggeri’s work also oscillates between the material and the immaterial, and painting and drawing. Much of the immaterial quality emerges when we approach the painting and at close inspection it becomes a pattern of intimate marks, more like an abstract drawing, making us lose our grasp of the overall appearance. As we move farther away, the massive forms of the cavern, the drifting cloud or the flying turf carpet return, materializing with incredible pictorial qualities. Theoretician Rosalind Krauss once explained that drawing is a conceptual experience, while painting provides a more sensuous immediacy. Ruggeri’s work incorporates both and allows for a choreographed movement between the two.

As the works move from form to formlessness and back to form, they question the illusionary space not only of the paintings/drawings themselves, but of the museum as well. They remind us that not everything is what it seems—museums may not be what they seem! Ultimately, Ruggeri’s paintings/drawings are a catalyst for experiencing real and imagined environments through her impeccable work.
Mónica Ramírez-Montagut, curator

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John Shearer
America (Continued)

Curator Richard Klein talks about John Shearer’s exhibition
John Shearer’s blog

John Shearer’s career as a photojournalist began in 1964, when at the age of seventeen he became one of the youngest staff photographers for LOOK magazine. Working for LIFE during the turbulent late 1960s and early 1970s, he quickly became a noted, award-winning photojournalist who focused primarily on the civil rights movement. His work in photography has now spanned forty-six years, and this exhibition brings together thirty photographs, the majority taken since 2004.

Shearer’s central concern throughout his career has been social justice, and the focus of this exhibition is immigration, which the artist believes to be the primary human rights issue currently facing the United States. The works in this exhibition explore immigration not as an isolated topic, but rather by relating it to the deeper issues of race, class, and economic disparity that are at the roots of discrimination and injustice.

Shearer describes his approach as “picture stories”—he wants to capture an image of an individual that somehow tells their complete story. Influenced early in his career by photographers such as Cartier-Bresson and Eugene Smith, Shearer brings an attitude of emotional idealism to the field of photojournalism, expanding it to embrace the ordinary people whose lives are so often invisible.

The exhibition is bracketed by two large images from early in Shearer’s career, adhered directly to the wall. One is a montage of photographs taken during the civil rights movement, and the other is a solitary portrait of Horace Wilcox, a black man who spent five years in prison in Prichard, Alabama, after being unjustly accused of rape. Acting as bookends to the other photographs, they express both the continuity of Shearer’s career and the unfortunate reality that the struggle for social justice is a continuing battle.

Press contact Pamela Ruggio, communications director: 1.203.438.4519 x48, pruggio@aldrichart.org

Image: KAWS, Untitled (Kimpsons) (Package Painting series), 2000–02
Courtesy of the artist

Opening Reception Sunday, June 27 2:30 to 5:30 pm

The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum
258 Main Street, Ridgefield, CT 06877
Hours Tuesday - Sunday, 12 noon to 5 pm
Admission Adults $7, seniors & college students $4
Members, K-12 teachers and children 8 & under FREE
FREE admission on Tuesdays

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