Stefana McClure
dal 12/4/2006 al 19/5/2006
Segnalato da
12/4/2006
Stefana McClure
Josee Bienvenu Gallery, New York
Distillation of time and obliteration of information characterize her drawings and sculptures. Her films on paper are minimal compositions of blurred lines consisting of the superimposition of the subtitles of an entire movie. All of her work involves translation, transposition and reconstruction.
The Year of Spaghetti
Josee Bienvenu Gallery is pleased to present Stefana McClure's fourth
solo exhibition in New York. Stefana McClure turns text into image.
Distillation of time and obliteration of information characterize her
drawings and sculptures. Her films on paper are minimal compositions of
blurred lines consisting of the superimposition of the subtitles of an
entire movie. All of her work involves translation, transposition and
reconstruction. In this new exhibition music is changed into text, text
is turned into image; a world atlas becomes a globe.
The Year of Spaghetti (from the title of a short story by Haruki
Murakami) consists of three new bodies of work: "played" and "typed"
drawings on Teflon, manga and comic strip drawings along with some small
paper sculptures. There is also a 36-minute single channel video
produced in collaboration with Jill Baroff.
The music into text and text into image drawings are "played" or "typed"
on virtual keyboards by pianists, typists and stenographers wearing
special gloves that have been modified to bear an IBM Selectric golfball
at the end of each finger. The golfball elements rotate freely so that
each of their 88 characters has an equal chance of being represented.
Some of the "typed" texts are by Georges Perec whose work was dominated
by the use of "constraints" others are by Gertrude Stein who reveled in
repetition. The music into text pieces range from Frobeger's Suite in E
Minor for harpsichord to Robert Schumann's piano duets.
The manga and comic strip drawings relate strongly to her earlier films
on paper, concentrating the dialogue of entire comic books into single
drawings, each new layer of text covering, but not quite obliterating
the one that went before it. Osamu Tezuka's Atom Boy, Katsuhiro Otomo's
Akira and Frank Miller's Sin City are among the works presented. The
paper sculptures deconstruct books (often lengthy ones such as Herman
Melville's Moby Dick or Reader's Digest Atlas of the World) and
reconfigure them as continuous balls of string...
Originally from Northern Ireland, Stefana McClure spent twelve years in
Japan; she now lives in New York. Recent and upcoming exhibitions
include: The Shape of Time, Kunstverein Grafschaft Bentheim, Neuenhaus,
Germany; films on paper, Galerie Yvon Lambert, Paris (project room), New
Acquisitions, The Indianapolis Museum of Art, IN; Pages, I Space, The
Chicago Gallery of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, IL.
Her work is included in the following public collections: The Museum of
Modern Art, New York; The Indianapolis Museum of Art, IN; The Baltimore
Museum of Art, MD; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; Yale University
Art Gallery, CT.
Opening: Thursday, April 13, 6 to 8 pm
Josee Bienvenu
529 West 20th Street - New York