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8/1/2004

Sprawl

Hudson Clearing, New York

Hudson Clearing is pleased to present sprawl, an exhibition of works by 9 emerging artists and artist groups which explores the human impulse to make its mark on a seemingly limitless environment. sprawl takes place in a 10,000 square-foot space in Soho, just steps from the entrance to the Holland Tunnel. Taking its title from the size of the venue and its proximity to one of the city's main commuter arteries, the exhibition includes large-scale and site-specific works that evoke ever-spreading systems of haphazard expansion.

Justin Beal considers urban sprawl to be an outgrowth of the American notion of a limitless frontier. His recent work examines this expansion and the dependence it creates on limited resources of space. Collecting and reconfiguring images of domestic and industrial landscapes from web searches, he creates composites of extreme imagined environments. Beal currently works for the firm TK Architecture on the It House, a low-cost building prototype developed collaboratively with artists and graphic designers.

Using landscape as an allegory for the mind, Jimbo Blachly creates fragile, meditative environments on the brink of collapse, using humble materials like cardboard, felt and paper. Elements from nature coexist on the same scale as rudimentary forms of architecture-like a mountain sheltered under a tarp-creating curiously intimate, humanized relationships between natural and manmade environments. Blachly was the recipient of the 2002 SculptureCenter prize.

Eric Brown uses the language of architecture but his sculptures are anything but straightforward constructions. An arrangement of works may call to mind a cluster of buildings, but they also evoke human qualities, such as vulnerability, through distressed surfaces and imperfect seams between rows of aluminum strips, loosely riveted together; and irrationality through disconcerting architectural analogies that don't accord, such as a 'bridge' that ends mid-air. Brown's work will also be on view in 'Home,' at the Dumbo Arts Center, from Jan. 17 through Mar. 13.

In Liam Everett's work, images from diverse contexts like teen magazines, African art and ‘60s psychedelia collide, amalgamating into obscure narratives that are both ominous and whimsical. He often uses found objects with the belief that they are silent repositories for stories, constructing anthropological puzzles in his sculptures, which have been known to shift during the course of an exhibition, as if endowed with a kind of autonomous intelligence. Everett recently completed a residency at the Künstlerhaus in Bremen, Germany.

Conflict and resolution have always been central to the work of Chris Hanson & Hendrika Sonnenberg, who use metaphors such as apples and oranges, and hockey fights to illustrate the process that leads to agreement. Their recent work depicting public address systems in states of dysfunction furthers this ongoing idea. In this exhibition their sculpture of a hockey scoreboard, wrecked as if it had just fallen from the ceiling, implies an aborted game and the sudden resolution of a competition. Onestar Press will publish their artists' book, Fruit Bowls and Hockey Fights, in early 2004.

Lisa Sigal challenges the idea that pictorial illusion ends at the edge of the picture plane with her mixed media installations that engage the architectural idiosyncrasies of their surrounding spaces. Stretching across entire rooms, her installations include paintings on wood panels, as well as existing walls, windows and doors. Sigal recently completed a commission for the Federal Reserve Bank in Atlanta.

International art/architectural collective Spurse describes itself as an 'organization that has no (fixed) content or members...a viral multiplicity...open to change, contradiction, multiplicity, inversions, tangents, hybrids, illness, infection, betrayal.' Spurse aims to redefine our understanding of urbanism and public space through performances, interventions, and installations. For this exhibition, Spurse created an installation that engages spatial polarities and hierarchies in the exhibition space, including interior/exterior surfaces and temporary/permanent structures.

In her film and video installations, Eve Sussman explores temporal and spatial relationships with an acute awareness of the sculptural possibilities of the medium. Her 20-foot tall film tower is made up of four linked projectors. One looped reel of 16mm film cycles through all four projectors, arranged such that they project a vertical column of four contiguous images that are visual and aural echoes of one another, like a song sung as a round. Her latest film, 89 seconds at Alcazar, was recently selected for the 2004 Whitney Biennial.

Oscar Tuazon constructs geodesic domes and-using this utopian ideal, which at the height of its popularity was considered the perfect model for living-underscores the distance traveled between past and present, urban and rural. Here, he touches on the subject of sprawl by invoking its opposite: density. Built from recycled newspaper and painted inside and out with glossy black paint, the dome acts as 'a kind of void, a hole in the space of the exhibition, where something else can be imagined; a space within the space...to escape to, or to escape through.

Opening reception: 9 Jan, 6 - 8pm

9 Jan - 8 Feb 2004
Open Fri - Sun, 12 - 6pm and by appointment

HUDSON CLEARING
250 HUDSON + BROOME
New York

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