calendario eventi  :: 

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18/1/2003

Three exhibitions

The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield

Mark Dion: Full House
January 19 - May 11, 2003

The Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art is pleased to announce Mark Dion: Full House, the first major New York area solo exhibition of this internationally-recognized American artist, on view from January 19 through April 27, 2003. As recipient of the prestigious 2001 Larry Aldrich Foundation Award, Dion was presented with $25,000 in October of 2001 and given the opportunity to mount a new exhibition at The Aldrich.

Full House will include seven major installations; a selection of over eighty drawings; a collection of the artist's journals from 1990 to the present; and a 1,000 cubic-foot Vivarium-a 22-foot-long fallen tree that has been harvested from a local forest and placed in a vitrine along with the moss, lichen, and insects that naturally inhabit a rotting log. The exhibition will celebrate Dion's unique approach to contemporary art, which reexamines the role that museums play in the presentation and interpretation of the natural world.

'I am so excited to have this opportunity to articulate the breadth of my work here in the United States,' Dion told The Aldrich. 'I have already had a number of survey exhibitions in Europe, and while I've had lots of smaller museum and gallery exhibitions in the U.S., the Aldrich exhibition is my first major survey exhibition in this country. What's more, The Aldrich is a perfect place for the exhibition. It is not the standard white box and my work is anything but the norm.'

Dion has been producing artworks that blur the boundaries between natural history, art, and science since the 1980s. His installations critique the cataloguing and presentation of artistic and historical material in western museums, exploring themes as diverse as archaeology, consumer culture, ecology, environmentalism, and political activism.

Drawings
This exhibition marks the first time that a comprehensive selection of Dion's works on paper will be on public view, with over eighty drawings exhibited in a salon-style installation in The Aldrich's historic 1783 building. Also on view will be a selection of the artist's journals and notebooks filled with sketches, postcards, photographs and illustrations, providing insight into Dion's working process and his investigation of themes that are subsequently developed in his complex multimedia installations. Images in the drawings include curiosity cabinets, archeological excavations, birds, insects, and various flora and fauna.

Installations
A fake stuffed polar bear seated awkwardly in a washtub filled with cured tar serves as the focal point for the installation Arctic Hall [1991-2002], accompanied by numerous photographs of polar bears in dioramas in natural history museums around the world. By bringing together existing works to produce this new installation, Dion speaks to notions of extinction at the hands of mankind.

Concrete Jungle [1993] focuses on animals and plants encountered in contemporary urban environments, including sparrows, raccoons, and rats. This installation questions the ability of the denizens of the biological and natural world to adapt to urban environs.

Library for the Birds of Connecticut [2002] represents man's repeated attempts to classify and thus control the natural world using established systems of knowledge. The central component to the installation, a dead tree, places man at the apex of the classical natural hierarchy. Books, stuffed birds and other objects, such as cages, are fastened to the tree's branches, poetically commenting on the systems of classification and of knowledge developed by science since the renaissance.

New England Digs documents and displays the found objects-from bits of glass and porcelain to industrial debris and intact household objects-from archeological digs led by Dion in spring 2001 in Brockton and New Bedford, MA, and Providence, RI.

Commissioned by The Aldrich and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery in New York for this exhibition, Vivarium [2002-2003] is a living terrarium, housing a 22-foot-long log, weighing over two tons, removed from the forest surrounding a Redding, CT reservoir. Encased in a 1,000 cubic foot greenhouse, Vivarium will mimic the classic natural history museum display filled with imitation flora and fauna-with the marked exception that Dion's version features the real natural world. Over 600 tiles surrounding the base of the Vivarium will present images of the plants and animals whose life is supported by the decaying wood. Vivarium will debut in a solo exhibition at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, where it will be on view from November 24, 2002 through January 4, 2003.

First assembled in 1994 and updated for this exhibition, When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth (Toys R U.S. ) conceives of a child's bedroom decorated entirely with dinosaurs, from wallpaper and pillowcases to countless dinosaur toys, plastic figures, and stuffed animals. This installation slyly comments on the presentation and marketing of nature, particularly to children.

In an effort to try to understand what motivated naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace, Dion has recreated, both visually and aurally, clues to Wallace's field practice, which may have led him to make his rapid evolutionary conclusions. The Delirium of Alfred Russel Wallace [1994] gives the viewer a glimpse of relationships and processes Wallace may have been surrounded with while grappling with large evolutionary ideas. The viewer is treated to sound bites of what could be the malaria-induced ramblings of the naturalist, as well as visual clues, such as Malthus's Principles of Population sitting near an unfinished letter to Darwin.

About the Artist
Born in Fairhaven, Massachusetts (adjacent to the industrial seaport of New Bedford) in 1961, Mark Dion credits his mother's interest in antiques with the development of his own curiosity about the aesthetics and history of objects. Dion attended the Hartford Art School at the University of Hartford, CT, before moving to New York City, where he attended the School of the Visual Arts and the Whitney Independent Program. Subsequent travels to Central America and throughout Europe solidified Dion's interest in biological and historical sciences.

Dion has had numerous solo and group exhibitions throughout the world, including those at: Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museu de Arte Moderna, Rio de Janeiro; New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; P.S. 1 Museum for Contemporary Art, Long Island City, NY; the Tate Gallery, London; the Nordic Pavilion at the 1997 Venice Biennale; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

Catalogue
The Aldrich will publish a fully illustrated catalogue in conjunction with the exhibition, entitled Mark Dion: Drawings, Journals, Photographs, Souvenirs, and Trophies, 1990-2003. Focused exclusively on the artist's works on paper, the catalogue will feature an introduction by Aldrich assistant director Richard Klein and an interview with the artist by Bree Edwards.

Mark Dion at Hartford's Joseloff Gallery
Mark Dion: Collaborations will be on view at The Joseloff Gallery, Hartford Art School, University of Hartford. The exhibition opens on Friday, January 31 from 6 to 8 pm, and continues through March 9. As a 1986 graduate of the Hartford Art School, Dion's exhibition is a highlight of the art school's 125th anniversary celebration.

Opening Reception: January 19, 2003 at 4 pm

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Carl Ostendarp: 189 Drawings

January 19 - March 23, 2003

The Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art is pleased to announce Carl Ostendarp: 189 Drawings, on view January 19 through March 23, 2003. Ostendarp's work engages the simplest visual forms and flatly applied colors to treat a complex assortment of subjects-including human relationships, art history, and popular culture-with his trademark humor. These gouache drawings reveal Ostendarp's working process and the inspiration for his more widely recognized large-scale paintings.

Cartoon-like in their visual directness, and sly in their art-historical references, Ostendarp's drawings are both funny and mysterious. Through a deceptively simple-looking set of forms, ranging from what appear to be feet, exclamation marks, and beans, combined with sophisticated choices in palette, the artist reduces ideas to their most essential and uncomplicated parts. Ostendarp's imagery may at first appear facile to read, but viewers find themselves engaged in a Rorschach test, where the artist's symbols ultimately lead each individual to a different end. Known for his tendency to use art-historical references, he inherited his sense of scale and flat fields of color from Barnett Newman and other abstract painters in the fifties and sixties.

The more intimate scale and spontaneous quality of the drawings delivers us closer to the artist's creative mind than his large-scale paintings on canvas. Despite their disarmingly simple composition, the works have a surprising amount of surface interest. The artist's use of toothy, serrated lines where areas of color meet, and the brushy, mottled way he sometimes applies paint, lend the works an emotional charge.

Ostendarp has shown his work in solo and group exhibitions in galleries across the U.S., Germany, and France. The work is in public collections across the country, including the Art Institute of Chicago; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT; and the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Opening Reception: January 19, 2003 at 4 pm

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New work by Janice Caswell

January 19 - May 11, 2003

The Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art is pleased to present new work by Janice Caswell, on view January 19 through April 27, 2003. Installed in the Museum's Micro Gallery on the second floor, a space newly dedicated to the exhibition of small artist's projects, Caswell's colorful iconic maps will fill the diminutive gallery with glimpses of places both real and imagined.

What began as a project to catalogue the many places the artist has lived, visited, and read about, has grown into a larger investigation of the way Caswell views and understands the physical world. As she was growing up, Caswell's family relocated often, developing a desire within her to remember and catalogue all the places of significance she left behind. For fear of losing these precious reminders, Caswell began mapping out the spaces from memory, identifying spatially the places of her past on paper and canvas.

Caswell's deceptively simplified maps consist of hole-punched paper, collage, marker, acrylic, and pins arranged on a white background. Paths of solid and broken lines meet with smooth flat areas of color and multicolored bursts, delineating routes taken, relationships between places, starting and end points, and groupings of people. In simplifying these represented places, Caswell focuses on lines, relying on the movement and abundance of the paths of color to evoke the ambiguous presence of their inevitable beginnings and ends.

On closer inspection of the artist's wall drawings, the places and paths themselves become less important than the process. In the act of recollection, Caswell is infusing her emotions-whether consciously or unconsciously-into the color, line, and space that make up each of her works. Born from a purely physical motivation to depict space, these drawings become a metaphysical exercise the artist has unwittingly embarked upon.

Opening Reception: January 19, 2003 at 4 pm

Image: Mark Dion, New Rngland Digs, 2001; colored pencil on paper; courtesy of Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, NY

The Aldrich Museum
258 Main Street
Ridgefield

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