calendario eventi  :: 

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30/4/2005

Five exhibitions

The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield

Contemporary Erotic Drawing and four solo projects by Mark Dion, Orly Genger, Pipilotti Rist, Roman de Salvo

The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum and DiverseWorks of Houston have co-organized Contemporary Erotic Drawing, an exhibition by thirty-four artists which encompasses the subject of sexuality and erotica. Exploring and defining what is erotic and titillating on their own terms, these artists display a diversity of sensibilities and approaches that range from the humorous, raunchy, and abstract, to fetishes, the personal, and intimate. The exhibition will tour nationally and be on view at The Aldrich from May 1 through August 7, 2005.

Contemporary Erotic Drawing will open to the public with a reception at The Aldrich on Sunday, May 1, from 4 to 6 pm. Round-trip transportation will be provided from NYC to the reception, call 203.438.4519 for reservations. This exhibition will have traveled from DiverseWorks, where it is on view January 28 through March 6, 2005.

The personally-charged process of drawing, combined with the subject of sex, follows ancient traditions in both Western and Eastern art. Expanding and commenting on these traditions, artists in the exhibition offer works that are personal, political, beautiful, startling, reflective, and biographical. The artists, who work on paper, animate hand-drawn images, and utilize other nontraditional materials, are Stephen Andrews, Alice Attie, Joseph Biel, Ion Birch, Cecily Brown, Scott Burns, Jacqueline Cooper, R. Crumb, Simon English, Heyd Fontenot, Leon Golub, Juan Gomez, Tom Knechtel, Joan Linder, Cristina Lucas, Gina Magid, Georgia Marsh, Ruth Marten, Kim McCarty, Jean-Francois Moriceau + Petra Mrzyk, Tracy Nakayama, Chris Ofili, Danica Phelps, Chloe Piene, Paul Henry Ramirez, Huston Ripley, Anita Steckel, Scott Teplin, Lynne Woods Turner, Mark Dean Veca, Ruth Waldman, Su-en Wong, and Gang Zhao.

The immediacy and delicacy of drawing allows these artists to express preliminary and often raw ideas, allowing spontaneous imagery or thoughts to emerge. When combined with the subject of eroticism and human sexuality, this makes drawing the perfect site of investigation, as we continue to produce, display, and enjoy images of desire, whether openly or sequestered. For both artists and viewers, Contemporary Erotic Drawing will provide a respectful, nonexploitative environment for the exploration of work that might otherwise be marginalized.

Contemporary Erotic Drawing has been organized by Harry Philbrick, director of The Aldrich; Sara Kellner, executive director of DiverseWorks; and independent curator Stuart Horodner. A fully-illustrated hard-cover catalogue, distributed by Distributed Art Publishers, will accompany the exhibition. It will feature essays by noted author Wayne Koestenbaum (author of The Queen’s Throat; Cleavage: Essays on Sex, Stars, and Aesthetics; and the Penguin Lives’ Andy Warhol) and Art in America writer and Hans Bellmer scholar Sue Taylor. The curators will contribute brief texts on each artist as well as an introduction.

Exhibition support is provided, in part, by:The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts

Opening Reception: Sunday, May 1, 2005, 4 to 6 pm

Panel Discussion: Sunday, May 1, 2005, 3:30 pm

Artists: Mark Dean Veca, Danica Phelps, & Anita Steckel

Curators: Sara Kellner & Stuart Horodner

Moderator: Harry Philbrick, Aldrich Director

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Mark Dion: Memento Mori (My Glass is Run)

May 1 – October 10, 2005

Opening Reception: Sunday, May 1, 2005, 4 to 6 pm

The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum will present Memento Mori (My Glass is Run), an installation by artist Mark Dion on view in The Aldrich’s Cornish Family Sculpture Garden from May 1 through October 10, 2005. An opening reception will be held on Sunday, May 1, 2005, from 4 to 6 pm. Round-trip transportation from NYC is available; please call the Museum at 203.438.4519 for reservations.

Mark Dion produces artwork that consistently blurs the boundaries between natural history, art, and science. A recipient of the Larry Aldrich Award in 2001, his works both critique and celebrate the cataloging and presentation of art, historical, and natural materials by museums, exploring themes as diverse as archeology, consumer culture, ecology, environmentalism, and political activism. Dion’s outdoor installation, Memento Mori (My Glass is Run), takes the form of a mock cemetery dedicated to significant American naturalists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that had worked in the greater Philadelphia area. The installation was originally commissioned by the Main Line Arts Center in Haverford, Pennsylvania as part of their exhibition Past Presence: Contemporary Reflections on the Main Line. Reconfigured for presentation at The Aldrich, the work will be suggestively installed in The Aldrich’s inner courtyard, creating the moody atmosphere of a history-laden churchyard.

When queried on the naturalists chosen for the tombstones, Dion replied, “Versed in literature, poetry, art, medicine, political theory of natural philosophy, they were the first true polymaths and people of startling intellect and talent.” Although the group of individuals was not actually buried near one another Dion’s project highlights both their connection with Philadelphia and their contributions to the early evolution of natural science in the United States. The work includes headstones dedicated to Benjamin Smith Barton, John Bartram, Jane Colden, Thomas Say, Charles Wilson Peale, Titian Ramsey Peale, Rembrandt Peale, and Raphaelle Peale.

Mark Dion lives and works in Beach Lake, PA. He attended the University of Hartford, CT, The School of Visual Arts in NY, and the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program, NY. In 2001, He was the ninth recipient of the annual Larry Aldrich Foundation Award and his award exhibition, Full House, was presented at The Aldrich in 2003. Also in 2003, Dion was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Hartford Art School in conjunction with the exhibition Mark Dion: Collaborations 1987 – 2003 at the Joseloff Gallery in Hartford, CT.

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Orly Genger

May 1 – October 10, 2005

Opening Reception: Sunday, May 1, 2005, 4 to 6 pm

Artist Performance: Sunday, May 1, 2005, 5 pm

The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum is pleased to present the first solo museum exhibition by New York City-based artist Orly Genger, on view from May 1 through October 10, 2005. Genger conceived her monumental new sculpture, hand woven from multicolored nylon rope, especially for The Aldrich. During the exhibition’s opening reception, which takes place on Sunday, May 1, 2005, from 4 to 6 pm, the artist will perform with her monumental hand-woven sculpture installed at the entrance of the Museum. In performance, Genger maneuvers her way through an unwieldy landscape full of awkward shapes and rich textures. Round-trip transportation from New York City is available; please call the Museum at 203.438.4519 for reservations.

Genger transforms knitting’s intimate, homespun aesthetic into large-scale works that relate more to post-Minimal sculpture and the color fields of late modernist painting than to craft projects. Her technique, which dispenses with needles altogether, deliberately narrows the distance between original idea and final object. Genger weaves thick strands of rope, elastic strapping, yarn, and metallic ribbon with only her fingers; the resultant objects are indexical traces of her unique process and directly convey the painstaking labor that goes into their creation. Her sculpture for The Aldrich, comprised of thousands of feet of nylon rope typically used by rock climbers, continues the Museum’s tradition of exhibiting unconventional outdoor sculpture and will stretch from the Museum’s historic “Old Hundred” building to the recently opened new Museum facility. Genger’s sculptures frequently lie on the gallery floor or on the ground; in her performances, they become a landscape through which the artist moves. The work becomes a literal extension of her body, as maker becomes object.

Orly Genger has exhibited at Socrates Sculpture Park in Long Island City, NY; the Haifa Museum of Art, Israel; and at Stux Gallery and Elizabeth Dee Gallery in New York.

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Pipilotti Rist

May 1 – October 10, 2005

Opening Reception: Sunday, May 1, 2005, 4 to 6 pm

The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum will present an installation by Swiss video artist Pipilotti Rist on view from May 1 through October 10, 2005. An opening reception will be held on Sunday, May 1, 2005, from 4 to 6 pm. Round-trip transportation from NYC is available; please call the Museum at 203.438.4519 for reservations.

Known internationally for her innovation within the medium of video art, Rist’s videos posses a visual language all their own, filled with saturated colors, grainy or distorted images, and wide, sweeping motions through landscape and space. For The Aldrich, Rist will install Grabstein für RW, a gray tombstone strewn with maple leaves. At the center of the tombstone, a round video screen seen through a half-lens depicts the artist herself, lying in the grass, with her red tongue thrust out. Sexually charged and ethereal, Rist’s performance confronts the boundaries of two distinct states of being, the ghostly with the flesh.
Born in Switzerland in 1962, Pipilotti Rist lives and works in Zurich and Los Angeles. She studied graphic design and photography at the Academy of Applied Arts in Vienna, then video at the School for Design in Basel, and was the recipient of the Premio 2000 Prize at the Venice Biennale in 1997. She has mounted solo exhibitions at MUSAC, Centro Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Castilla y Leon in Valladolid, Spain; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and the Centre of Contemporary Art in Warsaw; with an exhibition planned for Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, in 2006.

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Roman de Salvo: Main Street Sculpture Project

May 1 – October 10, 2005

The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum will present Liquid Ballistic by artist Roman de Salvo, the fourth sculpture in the Main Street Sculpture Project series, on the front lawn at The Aldrich from May 1 through October 10, 2005. An opening reception will be held on Sunday, May 1, from 4 to 6 pm. Round-trip transportation from NYC is available; please call the Museum at 203.438.4519 for reservations.

Blending a fascination for machines and craftsmanship with an interest in language and wordplay, Roman De Salvo’s work is imbued with wit and playfulness. Liquid Ballistic is the first Main Street Sculpture project to invite visitor interaction. This sculpture of a life-size cannon resembles old artillery, but it playfully comments upon outdoor recreation, roadside Americana, and idyllic pastimes and pleasures. The cannon made from mahogany is actually a seesaw that discharges a gentle stream of water from its muzzle when two people teeter-totter. In giving the cannon this function, de Salvo blunts its perceived function as a weapon, and instead finds a friendlier application for this piece of history. Perfectly paired with Ridgefield’s historic eighteenth-century Main Street, Liquid Ballistic will surprise passersby as a humorous, absurd, and poignant sculpture.

Roman De Salvo lives and works in San Diego, CA. He received his BFA from the California College of Arts and Crafts, Oakland, and his MFA from the University of California, San Diego. Liquid Ballistic was originally created for an exhibition in the sculpture garden of the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego. In 2003 he exhibited his work in American Idyll at the Public Art Fund in New York, and Baja to Vancouver: The West Coast in Contemporary Art at the Seattle Art Museum. In 2001 Salvo had a solo exhibition, Woods, at Quint Contemporary Art in La Jolla, CA

Image: Cecily Brown, animation cell from Four Letter Heaven, 1995

Contemporary Erotic Drawing. An exhibition by thirty-four artists which encompasses the subject of sexuality and erotica. Exploring and defining what is erotic and titillating on their own terms, these artists display a diversity of sensibilities and approaches that range from the humorous, raunchy, and abstract, to fetishes, the personal, and intimate. Four solo projects: Mark Dion - Memento Mori (My Glass is Run), Pipilotti Rist, Orly Genger, Roman de Salvo - Main Street Sculpture Project.

Aldrich Museum
258 Main Street - Ridgefield

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