Two Exhibitions
dal 22/3/2007 al 20/4/2007
Segnalato da
22/3/2007
Two Exhibitions
Wallspace Gallery, New York
Friedman constructs precarious sculptures that hover between familiar forms and complex abstractions. Brenna Youngblood combines painting and photography to create layered compositions that move between representation and abstraction.
Martha Friedman, Not Simply Connected
Using a perverse inventory of life-sized and jumbo foodstuffs, Friedman constructs precarious sculptures that hover between familiar forms and complex abstractions. As both parody of and homage to large-scale abstract sculpture, Friedman works between the hand-made and the ready-made, infusing robust materiality with a trickster`s sensibility.
Link is a hyperbolic arc of connected salamis. Each individual sausage in the chain is actual size and cast from urethane foam, its surface a painted facsimile of the real object. The large calligraphic curve is canted, balanced and looms precipitously over the viewer.
Noodle is a sculpture made from enormous elbow macaroni strung together on a prodigious black thread. A hyper-sized and highly finished version of a kindergarten `art' experience, "Noodle" offers an everyday counterpoint to the perfected forms of much twentieth century sculpture.
Also included is a series of companion drawings made from thick paste-like graphite brushed onto heavy weighted paper, portraying fictional balancing acts composed of both sausage and macaroni shapes. While suggesting traditional Sumi-e ink drawings, they illustrate a prankish world not entirely governed by gravity.
In describing Friedman's work, artist Josiah McElheny states: "... her sculptures... depict tricks and balancing acts, while arguing for the possible sexual connotation of everything. Structurally her work is like a history of sculpture from Bernini to Duchamp to Richard Prince; she uses modeling and moldmaking to make improbable conglomerations of everyday looking objects and sometimes `tells' some pointed dirty puns. Friedman describes how illusion is a magic act of supreme tenuousness, maybe formed of some not so nice parts."
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Brenna Youngblood, Murder by the Banks
Brenna Youngblood combines painting and photography to create layered compositions that move between representation and abstraction. Culling materials from a personal image archive, Youngblood treats her own photographs as stand-ins for the found imagery typically used in collage. The resulting works, made with acrylic, resin, photographs and spray paint, are dense accumulations of voices and styles that complicate the aesthetics of urban representations.
Four new works comprise Murder by the Bank, including Witness and Capital One. In each, domestic objects (clocks, light bulbs, a kitten) seem to offer a counterpoint to their loaded titles, creating an elliptical narrative rich in its just-out-of-reach symbology.
Image: Martha Friedman
Opening: Friday, March 23, 6:00PM - 8:00PM
Wallspace Gallery
619 West 27th Street - New York