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18/5/2006

Please Open the Door

NurtureArt, New York

Group show

Please Open the Door is a group exhibition that comprises site specific works by six visual artists working in sculpture, installation, light, and painting, curated by Veronica Mijelshon. The exhibition explores the boundaries between private and public, inner and outer, physical and mental spaces. Each artist was designated a booth with a door measuring 3 o (W) x 6 o (L) x 7 o (H) feet, built in-situ and asked to respond to that particular space. Each booth presents the artist with a space of freedom to create a world. In conjunction with the exhibition, NURTUREart presents a curator’s talk on Sunday, June 25.

The artists featured in the exhibition are: Iole Alessandrini, Fawn Krieger, Hiroyuki Nakamura, Sylvia Schwartz, Leonard Ursachi, and Patricia Yossen.

Gaston Bachelard defines the concept of door, "How concrete everything becomes in the world of the spirit when an object, a mere door, can give us images of hesitation, temptation, desire, security, welcome and respect". (Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, 1958) A door usually delimits spaces. It is one of those universal symbols that separate the public from the private sphere, as a fence or a wall. But unlike those, a door opens up the possibility, the possibility of transgressing the barrier.

As in Bachelard’s statement, each artist transforms a uniform space into a universe that responds to his or her inner vision. The same is true for the viewer who will have a unique interpretation and reaction to the work; the viewer, for instance, can choose to open the door, remain inside alone, simply peek in, or never experience the piece. We can compare the booths to human beings: from the same basic elements arise unique and personal minds, dreams, ambitions, expectations, and reactions. The exhibition underscores and makes tangible the phenomenon of art as both an inner, private experience, and a public, collective one. Art is as much an individual creation as the result of the social context in which it is created.

Through manipulation of light, digital media and physical space, Iole Alessandrini designs and builds ephemeral, controlled environments for people to enter and explore. Light is energy: waves and particles of infinitesimal dimensions that are made visible by boundaries. Architecture is change: a powerful and meaningful physical symbol that redefines space and creates new functions. Physical space in its states of transformation solicits emotional feelings and brings back memories. Light, being a remote projection from a time of which we have no memory, alters these feelings and stirs our emotions and ideas.

Two artists in the exhibition create sculpture and installations with architectural references. Fawn Krieger borrows the vernacular of domestic American architecture to deconstruct and reestablish traditional notions of home, inviting viewers to become active participants within her constructions. Krieger’s structures are offerings of protection and comfort as well as revelation and exposure. In return, Krieger builds a staircase inside and places a ladder outside the booth. Combining tangible and metaphorical elements of ascension and descension, the territory between basement and attic is occupied by the viewer who climbs up and down her installation, bypassing imposed points of entry, and positioning the body itself as both home and threshold. return is part tree-house, part fallout shelter, part Guantanamo Bay surveillance terminal, and part Aliyah. Leonard Ursachi uses architecture as a metaphor for systems that enclose and exclude, protect and reject. He is interested in the impact of structures - whether material, theoretical, social, or political - on individuals and communities. To enter and comprehend Slice, viewers must squeeze on either side of a white picket fence that divides the space in two which has symbols of privilege and comfort. A gold chair protrudes from the walls, two 19th century portraits, mirrored walls; but people can’t sit on the chairs and the portraits have been slashed at the mouth. In Slice, Ursachi blurs the boundaries between political/personal, public/private, comfort/pain. yours/mine. He dedicates this piece to Nikolai G. Tolstykh (aka Tolstich), a soviet intellectual and dissident who emigrated to NY. Mr. Tolstykh became homeless and disappeared in 2000 after being charged by NYC police for “obstructing a park bench" because he had his briefcase on it. (On park bench, another jolt in a bumpy life; moved along by the police, a soviet e'migre' vanishes, NY Times, March 26, 2000.)

Sylvia Schwartz and Patricia Yossen refer to the idea of overcrowding and congestion in urban spaces. Inspired strongly in nature, Sylvia Schwartz sees her sculpture more like a collection of evidence rather than a creation. For this exhibition, she overstuffs her space with oversized plaster blades of grass. Floor, ceiling and walls are seen as boundaries paralleling our own bodies; uprooted from its environment, nature is brought indoors, reinterpreted and relocated suggesting patterns of human migration. In her sculpture-plant, animal and human forms are deliberately blurred. The variability of each blade and their fluidity resemble our own state of constant transition, both mental and physical. Patricia Yossen uses idealized human forms to awaken strong and personal emotions in the spectator related to memory, distance and identity. The artist is interested in how individual histories interweave with a finite number of shared icons, themes and motifs to form a collective consciousness in modern western society. Yossen proposes a “public" idea from her most “private" inner space. Resembling New Yorkers’ apartments, or perhaps a specific social circle, the artist covers the walls with threatening-ironic-sarcastic smiling faces made of beeswax. The ideas of oppression, collective anguish, and fear are suggested in this piece, but the ultimate interpretation is left open for the viewer once s/he is alone in the deep tunnel of heads reflected infinite times and observing, accepting, rejecting, or criticizing the visitor.

Hiroyuki Nakamura approaches the booth as a purely psychological boundary, an imaginary place. He investigates how elements of popular culture become part of our individual consciousness and are reinterpreted from an individual perspective based on personal experiences. In this piece, Nakamura inserts the image of himself as a cowboy in an imaginary landscape. The cowboy embodies our nostalgia for the disappearing last human frontier. Since most geographical boundaries have been explored, the cowboy is left to delve into the infinite and unknown territory of the self.

The curator invites you to Please Open the Door for a personal experience...

Veronica Mijelshon is NURTUREart’s Gallery Director and an independent curator. She earned her Architectural degree from Universidad de Buenos Aires, Argentina, where she was born. Veronica Mijelshon is currently developing GACHU, a public art project for hospitalized children. She wrote essays for various exhibitions catalogues such as Flight, an exhibition in DUMBO and Un Espacio Libre, a public art project installed in Caguas, PR. Veronica Mijelshon is also a special assistant to the Diane Arbus Estate.

Opening reception: Friday, May 19, 6 - 9 p.m.

NurtureArt
475 Keap St., Ground Floor (Williamsburg, Brooklyn) - New York

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