calendario eventi  :: 

X

3/11/2011

Two Exhibitions

Camel Art Space, New York

Space Over Time

"...a landscape is not a natural feature of the environment but a synthetic space, a man-made system of spaces superimposed on the face of the land, functioning and evolving not according to natural laws but to serve a community…. A landscape is thus a space deliberately created to speed up or slow down the process of nature. . . . it represents man taking upon himself the role of time.”
—John Brinkerhoff Jackson, Discovering the Vernacular Landscape

Space Over Time is an exhibition of artists whose work uses landscape as a means of investigating history. Through practices which oscillate between representation and abstraction, the artists in this exhibition find within landscape not just a place in the present, but also a physical manifestation of historical time, whether that history is geological, political, imaginary, or all of the above.

Artists: Gina Dawson, Lauren Portada, Benjamin Tiven, Oliver Warden, Lauren Warner
Curated by Thomas Marquet

Oliver Warden’s paintings subsume diagrammatic renderings of landscapes into works which are palimpsests of time and place. In his work, multiple cartographies are absorbed into the language of abstract painting. In their layering, his works not only offer the optical present of abstraction, but also literally manifest the accumulation of geological and political history which shapes the world we live in, and by extension, the painting we’re looking at.

Geology, politics, and painting also intersect in the work of Lauren Warner. Her painting begin with the picturesque landscape of the US National Parks system, but subtly upend this idea of nature as “view” by picturing natural phenomena which frustrate our vision and processes which occur so slowly as to appear entirely static. With these images Warner reflects our tendency to imagine nature as a thing to visit and view, but frustrates that desire by offering us images which obscure as much as they reveal.

In Lauren Portada’s works on paper, we see a similar vision of spectacular nature, here deformed and obscured by an invasion of alien forms, instances of abstraction which foreshadow the “invasion” of wild spaces by human agency. These crystalline objects are not only figures within the natural world, but also axes around which spaces are folded and fissures appear, allowing for other places to intersect with these landscapes.

Gina Dawson’s work considers a different invasion of alien forms. In So You Won’t Be Lonely, Dawson takes as her subject the anonymous intervention of the crop circle. Whether the work of misguided land artists or extraterrestrials with poor communication skills, these paradoxically anonymous signatures impart to the landscapes on which they appear a greater significance. Dawson’s cut paper field brings two vernacular sculptural forms together, creating not merely the form of communication, but the very field which makes it possible, hinting at the larger history of which these circles are a part, that of our efforts to communicate with forces greater than ourselves, and the equal parts hope and fear which inform those efforts.

While Benjamin Tiven’s work also addresses interventions in the landscape, it does so to very different ends. In The Delight of the Yearner, the built landscape provides a cross-section of the experience of exile in the 20th century. The site of the Oceanic hotel in Mombasa, Kenya, provides a point of intersection of the lives of the German exile architect Ernst May and the Romanian exile urban planner Erica Mann. The intersection of their histories on this site serves as a point from which to consider the relationship between individual lives and the historical forces which shape them. This is reflected in the photographs of the ground on which the Oceanic hotel once stood, in which Tiven considers the ground itself, creating images in which description and abstraction are mutually entangled.

For all of these artists, the landscape serves not just to address history but also to consider the history of its representation. Whether by conflating geological history with current events, considering the history of our notions of natural beauty, or investigating the ways in which our interventions in the landscape reflect not only the time in which they were made but the history of which they wish to be a part, all these artists access history by considering space over time. – Thomas Marquet

Camel Art Space is an Artist operated exhibition Space with a focus on current trends in art within a not for profit work frame, is a member of Williamsburg Gallery Association and is participating in 2:nd Friday Art Walk. Situated in one of New York’s artistically defining neighborhoods we strive to provide an accessible exhibition platform and meeting venue for artists, curators and audience alike.

-----------------

Sequence and Seriality

A sequence is an ordered list of objects. Seriality, the quality of succession in a series, a social construct taking form in labels, either imposed or voluntarily adopted.

Camel Art PROJECT Space is pleased to present Sequence and Seriality, an exhibition of drawings, paintings, fiber reliefs and artist books that center around the notion of sequencing and grouping. The selected images can be arranged into linear and non linear narratives, either by line, color, shape or form.

Artists: Carolina Duque, Joshua Goode, Lindsay McCulloch, Sara Pringle, Bartek Walicki
Curated by: Bartek Walicki

Carolina Duque, a New York based painter turned fabric artist, crochets wool and sews cotton felt into off-white wall reliefs. The work, meticulous and focused, deals with issues of motherhood and femininity. The act of weaving, of constructing small sculptures out of thousands of woolen loops is perhaps the clearest example of sequencing. Ordered patterns parallel each other and grow, eventually forming three dimensional objects. Carolina’s work is mostly small. She displays her sculptures attached to walls. They ask to be cared for and viewed up close.

Joshua Goode is an installation artist and printmaker. His ambitious large scale installations, prints and drawings germinate in his small Texas garage. Joshua also makes artist books in his favorite medium, etching. Those, bound with heavy canvas, hand sewn and then painted, tell poignant stories. Small black and white images are grouped into narratives, some clear and other less defined. All of Joshua’s work centers around his disabled sister Sara, her relationship to her family and her presence in Josh’s psychological fabric. The installations made of wood, tar, paper and paint are reminiscent of ancient tombs; homes for the dead, places of familiar comfort. Their interiors are often lined with sequenced monotypes, linked to the larger forms by color and shape. Through his art, Joshua tells his specific mythology.

Lindsay MacCulloch is a painter and printmaker who lives and works in Maryland. Her work is often based on photographs, which she takes on her daily commute to work. The images often depict suburbia devoid of human presence. Lindsay transforms the mundane photographs into powerful and haunting prints and paintings. Her etchings and monotypes, sophisticated in their execution, lend themselves perfectly toward her pictorial goals. Lindsay often displays her work in grid formation or binds her pictures into artist books, creating a visually cohesive narrative.

Sara Pringle paints easel size self portraits in her loft apartment in Brooklyn. In them, she places herself along her cat and a young man, whose image she found on the internet. The figures are in foreground of vast natural settings: mountains, the ocean. Sara has painted this subject matter for over a year now; the need for investigation of the unlikely duo driving her series. Her beautifully painted pictures address the notion of intimacy in a world quickly becoming devoid of one via the society’s attraction to online existence.

Bartek Walicki lives and works in Brooklyn. He makes drawings, prints, dioramas and stop motion animations. The time consuming animations are painted, image by image on walls or canvas. Later the photographed images are assembled into a video file, and when played back, give an illusion of movement. Bartek’s cartoons are made with water colors, ink and markers on small sheets of paper, bound into accordeon style books. Their subject matter can mix sexual fantasies and sophomoric humor with violence. Some groups of images exhibit clear progression of time, other are categorized by content. Overall, Bartek’s art investigates the relationship of invented characters to their immediate surroundings. It takes from popular culture, current events, contemporary and past artists and most of all from his imagination. The depicted stories are often whimsical or absurd but always exhibit keen awareness of the human condition.

Image: Oliver Warden, Ziggeraut, 2010, Oil on Canvas, 21″ x 26″

Opening: November 4th, 6 – 9pm

Camel Art Space
722 Metropolitan Avenue - New York
Open Weekends: 12 - 6pm and by appointment

stampa

permanent link