calendario eventi  :: 

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9/9/2005

Three exhibitions

Sculpture Center, New York

Ayse Erkmen:
Artist in Residence
September 10 - November 27, 2005

SculptureCenter is pleased to present Busy Colors by internationally renowned artist Ayşe Erkmen, commissioned through SculptureCenter's Artist-in-Residence program. Born in Istanbul, Turkey and now living there and in Berlin, Germany, Erkmen is well known in Europe for her spectacular public projects and subtle architectural interventions. Busy Colors will be the artist's first solo exhibition in the United States and will be on view September 10 - November 27, 2005 with an opening reception on Saturday, September 10, 4-6 pm.

Busy Colors is a provocative and dramatic installation that works with and off of SculptureCenter's 100-year-old steel and brick building. Twin images of a small, jewel-like metal object (a sculpture of a landmine) are scaled up to billboard proportions and cover the entire 3,000 square foot surface of the courtyard. Inside, SculptureCenter's main exhibition space remains empty of objects but is activated by the automated movement of the building's 20-ton gantry crane, twenty-five feet above the ground. Attached to the crane are expanses of two different translucent fabrics, which, as the gantry moves from one end of the building to the other, alternately create vertical and horizontal colored planes, changing the dimensions and experience of the room. Simultaneously beautiful and menacing, Busy Colors emphasizes surfaces, thresholds, and barriers as sites where multiple social, cultural, and political conditions temporarily reveal themselves.

Erkmen's projects and installations respond to specific sites and contexts, often using physical displacement to engender perceptual and epistemological shifts. Shipped Ships (2001) was a project commissioned by DeutscheBank for which the artist brought three passenger boats to the Main river in Frankfurt, Germany - one from Japan, one from Venice and one from Istanbul. The boats came with their crews and for a nominal fee residents of Frankfurt could ride up or down the river in these foreign boats, undoubtedly changing the way they saw their own city.

Working indoors, she often adds little to a space but rather manipulates aspects of the architecture. In Das Haus (1993), for instance, Erkmen simply lowered the galleries' fluorescent lights to a few feet above the floor. What had been a mere aspect of the rooms' infrastructure became a sculptural object that also restricted viewers' movements within the space.

Ayşe Erkmen has completed several major projects in Europe over the last decade and has been included in many international exhibitions including Skulptur Projekte MŸnster 1997; Manifesta 1; the second and fourth Istanbul Bienniales; and the 2000 Kwangju Biennial. She has presented solo projects at Schirn Kunsthalle (Frankfurt); Magasin 3 (Stockholm); Secession (Vienna); Ikon Gallery (Birmingham, U.K.) and Kunstmuseum St. Gallen (Switzerland).

SculptureCenter's Artist-in-Residence program is supported by the Kraus Family Foundation and the Milton and Sally Avery Arts Foundation. Additional support for the Ayşe Erkmen residency and exhibition has been provided by the Moon and Stars Project, the Cultural Expansion Initiative of the American Turkish Society, and The Marmara-Manhattan Hotel, New York City. SculptureCenter's Artist-In-Residence program was initiated in 1987 with an installation by Petah Coyne. Artists who have participated in the program since then include Robert Chambers, Charles Goldman, Rona Pondick, Beverly Semmes, Olav Westphalen, and others.

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In Practice:
Special Project Series
September 10 - November 27, 2005

SculptureCenter is proud to present the work of Delia Gonzalez + Gavin Russom, Amy Granat, Susan Leopold, Joshua Smith, and Roy Stanfield. This work is commissioned through SculptureCenter's In Practice project series, which supports the creation and presentation of innovative work by emerging artists. The projects are selected individually and reflect the diversity of approaches to contemporary sculpture. These works will be on view September 10 - November 27, 2005 with an opening reception on Saturday, September 10, 4-6 pm.

Delia Gonzalez + Gavin Russom have been working collaboratively since 1998. Working in sculpture, sound, and performance, they incorporate references as varied as Greek tragedy, fascist architecture, Latin American mythology, 70s horror films, and disco culture. Their works address historical moments of decadence and extremes, and invoke celebrative, ritualistic, and destructive impulses. For their site-specific installation at SculptureCenter, Gonzalez and Russom combine several elements with which they have worked in the past and create a warped sense of space within the building's vaulted-ceiling galleries. Creating a simplified monument to absent action, the artists place a tennis net and two rackets on individual pedestals poised for a game, but devoid of utility. Constructed of wood, the netting is rendered with grid patterned high gloss formica and the "court" is lit with the intensity of a stadium. The installation becomes at odds with its own physical reality, a distortion that is further accentuated by an abstract soundtrack audible throughout.

Amy Granat's installation explores the surfaces of film and sound. Pursuing the material properties of film - rather than its narratives - Granat cuts, scratches, punches, or spray-paints 16mm film strips, a process that gives shape to the film's image and to its soundtrack. On the occasion of her new installation at SculptureCenter, The Space(d) Project/Out of Time and Fucked for Re-Entry (2005), the artist installs a series of film projectors and addresses the passageway architecture of the lower-level gallery, a narrow 70-foot long space. Granat turns the linear nature of film into its physical cousin, where endless loops of floating lines, scratches, and distorted noises replace film's traditional sense of time and place. The viewing experience itself emphasizes the flexible nature of film: on their way through the space, viewers push aside the series of loosely hung curtains on which the films are projected, creating further cuts and interruptions in the imagery's compositions.

Susan Leopold presents Inside Out (2005), a video installation where image, color, architecture, and perspective are fractured and scattered throughout SculptureCenter's lower-level gallery. A maze of mirrored walls and large-scale photographs reveal a slowly moving video projection of a desolate and decaying public swimming pool on the outskirts of Havana, Cuba. As viewers pass through the kaleidoscopic environment, the swimming pool continually shifts and realigns itself, suggesting the unconscious boundaries of interior space. Filled with images - projected, reflected, and distorted - the gallery becomes a place of omnipresence, pointing to the artist's interest in surveillance and voyeurism. Although the images are devoid of people, viewers navigate through them in an architecture of mirrored walls, adding their own reflections to the empty landscape and merging the anonymous with the intimate.

Josh Smith presents a large selection of his artist books. A prolific artist primarily known for his paintings of his own name - a repetition that is marked by changes in colors, sizes, and deformations, while the subject remains consistent - Smith also works with collage, drawings, and books. The artist constructs not only images, but situations within which viewers encounter them: his paintings have been presented as installations encompassing all surfaces of the exhibition site. At SculptureCenter, Smith designs a reading room - complete with tables and chairs made by the artist - where viewers become visitors and are invited to spend time looking through the dozens of single edition and photocopied artist books, each of which addresses a different aesthetic and theme. A conceptual artist, Smith is interested in the processes by which we locate meaning in representations, and how repetition, the copy, and the collective consumes and incorporates the gesture, the original, and the individual subject. Making use of limited materials, Smith develops a language of abundance, humor, contradictions, and striking singularity.

Roy Stanfield is drawn to transitional spaces: castaway materials on forgotten rooftops, deserted skateboard ramps, or lifted pages from glossy magazines. For the artist, these spaces contain the vitality of lived experience and the entropy of economic malfunctions, and he uses trophy-objects to carry the energy and contradictions of these spaces into the gallery context. At SculptureCenter, the artist reverses his process by considering the basement exhibition space as a transitional space, caught between a place of imagination and one of abandonment, and he puts the site itself on view through a sculptural installation made entirely of Plexiglas. Untitled (plexi) (all works 2005) consists of a Plexi barrier structure - made of found Plexi pieces, and stained with graffiti mark and discolorations - that partially obstructs the viewer from entering the gallery. Further into the space, Untitled (plug) and 2-7 sticks fully blocks any passage by proposing a Plexi wall with foam plugs, thereby prohibiting access to the remaining part of the gallery. Both constructions act as discreet markers of territory, almost invisible in their transparency, but physically potent in their refusal of the space.

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A Walk in the Park
September 10 - November 27, 2005

SculptureCenter is proud to present A Walk in the Park, an exhibition of photographs and sculpture by four artists, where nature intersects with the man-made. The landscapes in this exhibition emerge from a love of the natural, no matter how confused it is with the artificial. A Walk in the Park presents a breezy place of quiet contemplation: enjoy the greenery, and don't worry about what is real and what is not. The exhibition will be on view September 10 - November 27, 2005 with an opening reception on Saturday, September 10, 4-6 pm.

Part photograph and part sculpture, Matt Keegan's Untitled (Light Leak #1) (2005) presents a ray of sunshine that pierces through the gallery's sheetrock wall. In this work, representation merges with composition, as the romantic photograph of the sun shining down through forest trees mimics the physical photograph itself, set behind the drywall's surface. Combining a spiritual moment with a destructive one, a photographic gesture with a sculptural one, and a place where nature rules within a place where walls keep nature out, the artist constructs a world of opposites where a torn-away gallery wall can still allow for magic, transcendence, and beauty.

Reka Reisinger also positions the man-made within the natural world - or vice-versa - in her photographs of real and artificial landscapes. In Untitled (Minnewaska) (2004), a dramatic image of a gorgeous riverbank, she places a life-sized cardboard cut-out of herself posing for the photograph. For Untitled (Natural History Museum) (2002), the same cut-out is seen only in dark silhouette, standing in front of a diorama in the Natural History Museum. Doubly present as the photographer and the photographed, the artist - and her represented twin - uses the schizophrenic and sometimes indistinguishable relationship between the real and fake to explore the logic of image-making.

James Yamada works in a wide range of media. In an ongoing series of photographs, he arranges objects outdoors to form still lives in the natural landscape. An appropriation of painting's still-life genre and a formal sculptural arrangement of physical shapes, these photographs also incorporate the passage of time: live animals appear in the images - birds in Propane Reflection (2005) and ants in Blue and White Balls (2005) - and erase distinctions between photography's capture of a static image and that of a fleeting moment. Viewers become passersby, witnesses of a time when nature's wildness is synchronized, for an instant, with man-made composition.

With his sculptural installation of mylar mobiles, If today was perfect, there would be no need for tomorrow (Part 2) (2005), Michael Phelan references art history, neo-spirituality, and bad public art as part of his ongoing endeavor to remodel the contemporary American landscape. Phelan explores Manifest Destiny and its relationship to mass-market products and foreign manufacturing - a relationship that is mimicked in the artist's own production process. While typically meant to seamlessly blend into our domestic interiors or landscape designs, Phelan's objects slip between the decorative and the functional and become isolated figures of an idealized world where nature and artifice and the real and the unreal stop being contradictions.

For more information, photographs or interviews with the artist, please contact Katie Farrell at 718 361 1750 x111 or kfarrell@sculpture-center.org.

Image:
Ayşe Erkmen
Detail image from Busy Colors, 2005

SculptureCenter
44-19 Purves Street Long Island City
New York

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