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26/9/2015

EAF15

Socrates Sculpture Park, New York

curated by: Gary Carrion-Murayari and Nora Lawrence Socrates Sculpture Park is thrilled to announce EAF15: Emerging Artist Fellowship Exhibition featuring fifteen new site-specific works by contemporary sculptors selected through a highly competitive open call process. EAF15 marks the fifteenth anniversary of this annual exhibition program, a milestone we will mark during the opening reception on Sunday, September 27th from 3 to 6PM. The opening event will feature performances by EAF15 artists José Carlos Casado, David Horvitz, and Melanie McLain. EAF15 will be on view through March 13, 2016.

EAF15 emphasizes the breadth and vitality of contemporary sculpture by focusing on new commissions and ideas. Diverse in subject and approach, the fifteen works on view provide critical considerations on subjects ranging from modern interpretations of Romanticism to contemporary statuary, from explorations of urban design to the trajectories of the African Diaspora. Detailed descriptions of each project are included.

The annual EAF Exhibition is the cornerstone of Socrates Sculpture Park’s visual arts programming and is widely acclaimed for the ambition, breadth, and innovation of the contemporary artworks on view. EAF15 artists were selected through a highly competitive open call process that attracted 350 candidates, reviewed by the park’s 2015 curatorial advisors Gary Carrion-Murayari (Curator, New Museum) and Nora Lawrence (Curator, Storm King Art Center). Selected EAF15 artists were awarded a 2015 Emerging Artist Fellowship, including financial support, 24/7 access to the park’s outdoor studio and facilities, as well as technical and curatorial support to realize the most ambitious work possible for the artist.

Works on view

Kenseth Armstead
Kenseth Armstead’s artwork, titled Master Work: Astoria Houses, Building 24 will map the footprint of a single tower of the Astoria Houses, home to over 3,100 individuals and is located just north of Socrates Sculpture park. Composed of aluminum tubing and mixed media, the installation will mark the outline of the building’s form in a reduced yet impressive scale. Unlike the eponymous housing tower, which is composed of solid brick and cement, Armstead’s Astoria Houses will be minimal and porous, allowing light, visitors, and the landscape to filter through the structure in an active, inviting manner.

Charlotte Becket & Roger Sayre

Charlotte Becket and Roger Sayre work collaboratively on public projects that explore and reframe environmental materials and contexts. Their project for Socrates Sculpture Park, Full Tilt, will depict a neighborhood “bodega” façade tilted on its axis and embedded into the ground. The work speaks to the demise of local businesses while positing a playful altered reality, one in which the small neighborhood deli is relocated and operating in a parallel, horizontal universe. This work will be a reflection of the rapid commercial zoning, changing development presence, and economic disparity widespread in the neighborhood surrounding the park. The title Full Tilt suggests the literal collapse of a structure, as well as the consequences of economic and social shift on a community.

José Carlos Casado

José Carlos Casado's EAF15 installation, Trade, is inspired by the artist’s 2014 expedition in the archipelago of Svalbard, in the Artic Circle. While there, he witnessed how the effects of extreme climate change have uncovered new routes for polar exploration, opening the floodgates to conflicts over natural resources. Casado identifies this transformation of natural resources into objects-for-trade as an act of violence against nature—a terrorism of sorts. His brightly hued metal skins, each a unique texture created through an intense 3D digital investigation of human flesh simultaneously represent precious stones and parts of the body, linking the exploration of natural resources with human brutality and creating uncomfortable parallels between global warming, terrorism, commerce, and war.

Torkwase Dyson

Site on Sight: 2 (The Door of No Return) will address the intersection of identity, architecture, liminality, and the body through a geometric installation along the waterfront at Socrates. Site on Sight will reimagine the architecture of the Door of No Return. Sited in Elmina Slave Castle in the West African country of Ghana, the Door of No Return is where innumerable Africans were held before transport to slavery in the Americas, between 1637 and 1814. Dyson's Site on Sight will remake the Door into a form that integrates sky, ground, air, and water, allowing for an ethereal sensory experience. In interpreting and redesigning this historic space, Dyson will seek to reshape not only the physical architecture, but also the emotional narrative around this historic space. In providing a new context for this history, Site on Sight will positively contribute to an updated personal relationship for the artist and the site, and their shared history.

Carla Edwards

Carla Edwards examines how dominant culture and its artifacts shape our sense of identity and self. Through appropriation, manipulation, and reconfiguration, the artist’s material interventions alter the meaning of an original subject. At Socrates Sculpture Park, the artist will cast and carve a series of concrete and stone grottos to create a sacred, seemingly mythological site. The area surrounding this statuary will be landscaped in detail with plants and flowers, but the grottos will be left empty, creating a void for the public to project - and possibly even offer - their own devotional objects. Drawing from the grotto as a space for personal ritual, Gain and Cost will examine the positive relationship between personal identity, closely held belief, and artifact.

Davey Hawkins

Davey Hawkins' Inclusions is a low-lying, undulating installation that follows the topography of park-scape with an arrangement of cast cement vessels. Each vessel is formed and broken apart by Hawkins's collection of marine Styrofoam - synthetic blue foam that never degrades and continuously seeps into waterways, washing onto shorelines. Sited at Socrates Sculpture Park, a former illegal dumpsite and landfill, these cement blocks suggest that the archive of human intervention with the natural world is insoluble, and possibly endless.

Lena Henke

Lena Henke’s installation Stand Back, will integrate animate and inanimate to create a whimsical tableau of a metal and sand sculpture sited beneath a weeping willow tree. The iconography of the melancholy weeping willow tree - a stand-in for classic Romantic depictions of death and nature - contrasts with the unsentimental industrial sand and metal materials. Sited together along the East River at Socrates Sculpture Park, the juxtaposition references and undermines many Romantic art historical depictions of the natural. For Henke, classic literary symbolisms of the willow tree, such as Shakespeare's "Hamlet" when doomed Ophelia breaks willow branches and tosses them into the river where she eventually drowns herself, furthers the emotional play of the three-dimensional artwork along the water.

David Horvitz

David Horvitz's lullaby for a landscape breaks down the melody of a lullaby into individual notes which each play from large chimes installed within the grove of trees at Socrates Sculpture Park. Individually, each chime is a fragment of a completed song that only exists within a singular moment of time. Collectively, the chimes complete the lullaby strain and progress temporally to evoke a surreal dream-state. Accompanying the lullaby is an installation of fragrant sedative plants that will bloom each evening throughout the fall, adding an alluring olfactory experience to the installation.

Charlotte Hyzy

Charlotte Hyzy's carved wood sculptures, Dessert Babes, playfully depict voluptuous or "plus-size" nudes as delicious confections. The sculptures are an attractive melding of idealized sugary sweets and the sensuous physiques that are traditionally associated with indulging in them. Hyzy's sculptures serve as an examination of societal perceptions of the female body and its preoccupation with an “ideal” weight and form.

Melanie McLain

Tactile Formation is a participatory architectural sculpture and performance series that draws together the interior design and functionality of health clinics, spas, and medical centers. In bringing the institutionalized health aesthetic outdoors, Tactile Formation blurs the separation between the interior and exterior realms and the divide between private and public action. This hybridized environment will invite viewers to interact with McLain’s work by walking on, lying under, and grabbing onto different elements of her piece. To guide and prompt these interactions the artist is organizing accompanying performances, in which acrobats and masseurs will perform a series of choreographed movements that engage the sculpture and audience directly.

Kirsten Nelson

Displaced Corner will evoke recognizable moments of a new building in a moment midconstruction. Like the construction it mimics, the sculpture will be assembled from cinder blocks, concrete, metal studs, rebar, and orange safety fencing. Together these materials will display the structural elements that are normally hidden from view, exposed only for a short time during the construction period. Each wall will contain a window opening, posing as an architectural show model, or sample corner. While the exposed minimal structure will remain raw and reductive, ornate concrete patterns will decorate the surfaces like a faded façade, visually conflating the acts of creation and decay.

Freya Powell

Freya Powell’s Active Turn will create an intimate and illusionist landscape along the park’s waterfront. Looking into Powell’s steel zoetrope will reveal a transition from representations of the existing cityscape to images of the ocean’s open horizon. A zoetrope is a 19th Century optical device that creates the illusion of motion by spinning a progressive set of still images. For the artist, the horizon is a symbol not only of the limits of our knowledge, but also the potential of our imagination to understand beyond sensory experience. The animation of Active Turn will be subtle, initially echoing the skyline behind it; the images will provide a transportive opportunity to glimpse an open skyline while contemplating the unfamiliar.

Leah Raintree

Leah Raintree’s Another Land will be a two-dimensional black and white photograph inlayed in the ground of Socrates Sculpture Park, which will read as both an archaeological discovery and a sculptural intervention. Another Land is from the artist’s ongoing series of photographic and sculptural works that take their point of departure and inspiration from Isamu Noguchi’s carved stone sculptures. Noguchi was a distinguished Japanese-American sculptor, designer, and landscape architect whose renowned museum and foundation is only one block away from Socrates. Raintree’s work will allude to Noguchi’s manipulated stone “landscape tables,” the physical geologic markings of glacial retreat, and the photographic documentation of cosmic bodies to form a new, otherworldly image.

Aaron Suggs

In Aaron Suggs's fourth installment of his floating watercraft series, a sea-worthy boat will be patterned – from hull to sail – with a digital collage of images sourced from within Socrates Sculpture Park. For his previous iterations, Suggs built a monochromatic white boat, a trompe l'oeil camouflage boat, and a fully transparent boat. His latest vessel will float in the East River near the park’s shoreline, extending the landscape of the park out into the water.

Noa Younse

Noa Younse’s The Ant Ensemble is a physical demarcation that slices through the landscape of Socrates Sculpture Park. For his installation, Younse will position unique wooden markers along the directional line of New York City’s North-to-South avenues, creating a spatial and volumetric boundary that is further emphasized by illuminated points positioned on each unit. The static order of the cardinal minimalist line contrasts with the playful expressiveness of the animated illuminated components. The computational techniques the artist employs to program this animation generate a visual effect that pivots between night and day, visible and invisible, and fundamental order and chaos.

Image: Poster

Press Contatc:
Nora Webb, nw@socratessculpturepark.org

Opening: Sun Sep 27, 3pm

Socrates Sculpture Park
32-01 Vernon Boulevard, New York
10am to 6pm daily

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