calendario eventi  :: 

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2/5/2015

Six Exhibition

The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield

Virginia Poundstone : Flower Mutations
Curated by Amy Smith-Stewart.

Taking formal inspiration from Giacomo Balla's series of Futurist Flowers as well as traditional American flower-pattern quilts, Virginia Poundstone (b. 1977, Great Lakes, Illinois) will present a new outdoor sculpture and an earthwork on the Museum’s grounds and curate an interior room of artworks and objects that investigate the visual representation of flowers through abstraction in art and design. The outdoor sculpture, a geometric flower in stone and glass that will stand eight feet tall, is based on the geometry of a traditional quilt pattern. It will be placed in the interior courtyard, where it can also be viewed from inside the Museum’s atrium, enveloped from behind by a blanket of colorful tulips (more than 3,000 bulbs have already been planted in eight dynamic color hues) that will cover the sloping grassy embankment to form a resplendent garden. Inside the Museum’s expansive Project Space and Balcony Gallery, visitors will encounter new glass sculptures by Poundstone, as well as a monumental wall print of Rainbow Rose (2013), alongside seminal inspirational works by artists that span generations and art historical movements. Alongside these influential works on loan from institutions around the country, Poundstone will also include objects from her own collection.

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Nancy Shaver: Reconciliation
May 3 to October 25, 2015

Nancy Shaver, in a career that has spanned four decades, has consistently worked to challenge expectations on the aesthetic hierarchies found in visual culture. Her practice, which involves finding objects, making objects, and recontextualizing objects, has been informed by a critical eye that looks—and looks hard—at the culture of materiality with an attitude approaching that of an anthropologist. But Shaver’s practice is not just based in an intellectual pursuit; it is equally informed by personal experience—specifically a life that has been lived in the dichotomy between her rural, working-class roots and the high-art world that she has engaged since the 1970s.

The majority of exhibitions of Shaver’s work include hierarchy-bending components, and Reconciliation is no exception, bringing together the artist’s recent sculpture, works by other artists, found objects, folk art objects, and utilitarian objects. But in this instance, the exhibition is framed by the presence of two artists whose names have probably never been linked before: Walker Evans (1903–1975) and Sonia Delaunay (1885–1979). Evans is the American photographer who became known in the 1930s for his stark depictions of life during the Depression, particularly in the rural south; Delaunay, the French Modernist artist, was a painter and textile and fashion designer. Shaver, through this juxtaposition, is positing her life and work as a reconciliation between the make-do aesthetics of Allie Mae Burroughs, a cotton sharecropper whose home in Alabama was extensively photographed by Evans in 1935, and Delaunay’s sophisticated endeavors in the Parisian art and fashion world of the 1920s.

Shaver’s sculpture primarily utilizes fragments of used clothing fabric and other textiles that reflect the demographics of the region around her home in upstate New York. She selects fabrics not just for the abstract patterning and color, but also for their encoded sociological meaning. For instance, fancy dress material is placed adjacent to camouflage fabric; tweed is butted up against boy’s pajama material printed with sports motifs. Besides “cheap” cloth, Shaver frequently incorporates fragments of highly refined Japanese textiles, as well as patterned fabric that she creates by drawing with a china marker on muslin. Shaver’s work suggests horizontal movement, a socioeconomic leveling where there really isn’t much of a difference between haute couture and Walmart. The collaged fabric-scrap nature of these works resembles quilting, and Shaver is very aware that her process relates to vernacular fabric collage; but by wrapping fabric around wooden blocks and assembling the blocks into three dimensional objects, she is declaring them to be more a part of the world of art—not craft—a position where both making and philosophical inquiry are on an equal footing.

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Ruby Sky Stiler: Ghost Versions
Curated by Amy Smith-Stewart

Ruby Sky Stiler’s (b. 1979, Portland, Maine) experimentation with Hydrocal plaster evolved alongside her interest in the scholarly history of classical plaster cast replications. Through time these objects have fallen in and out of favor. Her cast reliefs originate from compositions of detritus from previous works and fragments of left-over materials salvaged from around her studio, making ghostly references to objects she describes as “not present and no longer in existence.” For The Aldrich, her site-specific installation will display her own wall-scale plaster reliefs with a selection of classical casts. The wall arrangement will consist of multiple casts of her works, designed as a tiled repeat pattern. This process calls to mind classical bas-relief, design elements in Le Corbusier’s concrete architecture, Picasso’s sgraffito works, low relief in municipal sculpture, and decorative relief. This interplay of references, espousing both the high and low, explores questions of taste, originality and value. Curated by Amy Smith-Stewart.

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Penelope Umbrico: Shallow Sun

For artist Penelope Umbrico, light, and our changing relationship to it, has become one of the main subjects of a practice that challenges what normally constitutes ideas about photography and its presence in our lives. Umbrico is part of the first generation of artists to have participated in the transition from traditional photography to digital media and its attendant complexity. Rather than just swapping one technology for another, however, Umbrico has completely embraced the world in which photography now finds itself—a world where light is transformed into code and completely disassociated from its original context, and where even the sun has become a digital artifact.

This exhibition presents a ricocheting trajectory through photographic history: sunlight, shadows, apertures, dark rooms, chemical-based photography, photocopies, mechanical and electronic hardware (strobe lights, CRTs, ink-jet printing, pixel grids, LEDs), digital processing (image authoring software, video editing software, smart phone camera apps), and the infinite universe of images on the Internet.

Shallow Sun brings together a series of works that play off The Aldrich’s camera obscura, a feature that was included in the Museum’s new building in 2004. The most fundamental of all photographic technologies, the image in a camera obscura is based on contingency: the sunlit landscape that is immediately outdoors is projected “live” onto an interior wall. Here, Umbrico has subverted that process by placing an enclosure that houses a flat-screen monitor on the outside of the camera’s aperture. Playing on the monitor is a version of Umbrico’s piece Sun Screen, a looped, digital animation composed of still sun images the artist has found on the Internet. Sun Screen (Camera Obscura) has taken the fundamental contingent nature of the image in a camera obscura and replaced it with information that comes from the Cloud: sunlight that was turned into code, uploaded onto the Internet, and downloaded as code, converted into screen light, then “reprocessed” back into an image of the sun through analog technology.

In other works in the exhibition, Umbrico has photocopied images of solar eclipses from the picture collection of the New York Public Library and transformed them both by hand and with cell phone camera apps, expanding and engaging the way that an eclipse inverts the usual roles played by the sun and the moon. In the work Light Leaks (from smartphone camera apps) Umbrico has built a “black box,” a space that references both the camera obscura and the inside of a camera, and used it to house a video installation that is composed of an animated library of fake light leak camera app effects in an attempt to return these digital artifacts to the transcendental quality of natural light.

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Elif Uras: Nicaea
Curated by Amy Smith-Stewart

The paintings and ceramic sculptures of Elif Uras (b. 1972, Ankara, Turkey) explore what she describes as “shifting notions of gender and class within the context of the East-West paradigm.” Uras will transform The Aldrich’s Screening Room into an interior courtyard, a prominent feature in traditional Turkish architecture, using sculptures made in Iznik (Nicaea), an ancient city that was celebrated for its tile and ceramic production during the Ottoman Empire. Uras took inspiration from ancient Greek vases depicting male figures tending the olive fields and making pottery; now female workers, artisans, and entrepreneurs, populate and manage these industries. Uras honors this gender reversal by placing the modern Turkish woman center stage. A functioning ceramic fountain will grace the gallery, while small vessels offer a nod to their inherent domesticity. The exhibition will include an original Iznik plate from the first half of the sixteenth century, loaned by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, positioned in dialogue with Uras’s work. Support for this exhibition has been provided by the SAHA Association.

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B. Wurtz : Four Collections
Curated by: Amy Smith-Stewart

For more than forty years, B. Wurtz has been transforming throwaway objects found in daily life—shoelaces, plastic bags, food containers, buttons, socks, hangers—into elegant, poetic compositions that evoke the condition of being human. Wurtz’s sculptures and wall pieces employ a strategy of arrangement hinged upon a simple and direct means of expression, a balancing of two opposing forces—the cast-off and the collectible, the timeless and the ephemeral—that speaks at once to the mind and the heart.

Since 1990, Wurtz has produced an ongoing body of work that he refers to as “pan paintings.” These wall pieces are made from ordinary aluminum food containers and roasting pans purchased at grocery or variety stores. These inexpensive and disposable pans transcend socio-economic class, passing through every home; but by painting over the patterns and texts on the exterior of the pans with various colors of acrylic paint, Wurtz has transformed the ordinary into something invaluable. For The Aldrich, he covers three walls of the Erna D. Leir Gallery, salon style, with over 200 of his pan paintings dating from 1991 to 2015. Appearing like geometric abstractions, their compositions are predetermined not by Wurtz, but by a nameless maker, as he accentuates the full range of their embossed designs. Alongside his own works, on a long shelf, Wurtz presents a collection of common domestic objects he’s been acquiring over the years from second-hand shops and eBay. The objects—from American Brilliant cut glassware to Wedgwood pottery and mid-century Danish modern Krenit bowls—represent a number of distinctive styles and periods, and have no immediate connection to each other. In bringing them together, Wurtz offers up a compelling dialogue about high art, decorative art, form and function, as well as the act of collecting.

Image: B. Wurtz, Untitled (pan painting), 2013. Courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures, New York.

Press Contact:
Pamela Ruggio, communications director
T + 1 203 438 4519 / pruggio@aldrichart.org

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