calendario eventi  :: 

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12/9/2009

Three exhibitions

Sculpture Center, New York

Grand Openings

SculptureCenter is pleased to present a new exhibition by Grand Openings, on view September 13-November 30, 2009 with an opening reception on Sunday, September 13 from 5-7pm.

Founded in 2005 by Ei Arakawa, Jutta Koether, Jay Sanders, Emily Sundblad, and Stefan Tcherepnin, Grand Openings is a cooperation of artists working in different disciplines uniting performance, acting, singing, painting and critique. They create a mise-en-scène of overlapping actions, loosely defined choreography and chaotic structures with multiple identities and often dissonant iterations.

Readily shifting between a multimedia event, an entertainment, a learning experience, and a kind of disorderly order to be encountered by viewers and participants, the exhibition at SculptureCenter presents a series of unique posters and a limited edition Grand Openings publication. Documenting public performances and privately staged actions, the installation acts both as an archive of the collaborative group's past and a preview or diagram for future scenarios. By also exploring how their performances can take the form of printed matter, Grand Openings continues to challenge the presumed roles of performers, producers, directors, and observers.

Grand Openings has appeared at the Anthology Film Archives as part of Performa05, (New York, 2005), magical Artroom (Tokyo, 2006), Echglo-Tsumari Art Triennial (Nigata, Japan, 2006), MUMOK (Vienna, 2008), the Henry Art Gallery at the Bumbershoot Arts Festival (Seattle, 2008), and Art Basel Statements (Basel, 2009). Their videos have been shown at the Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, OH; Kunsthalle Zürich; and Tbilisi 3 and Tibilisi 4 (Tbilisi, Georgia).

This exhibition is presented with the support of the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. Additional thanks to Taka Ishii Gallery (Tokyo, Japan) for their assistance with Grand Openings at SculptureCenter.

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In Practice Projects Fall 2009

SculptureCenter is pleased to present new works by Jason Kraus, Meredith Nickie, Marlo Pascual, Xaviera Simmons, Marianne Vitale, and Erik Wysocan. The works on view are commissioned through SculptureCenter's In Practice project series, which supports the creation and presentation of innovative work by emerging artists and reflects diverse approaches to contemporary sculpture. The exhibition will be on view September 13-November 30, 2009, with an opening reception on Sunday, September 13, 5-7pm.

Jason Kraus, Making a Mold, 2009
Making a Mold walls off a twenty-five foot section of the lower level galleries' central corridor and creates two views onto the eponymous action underway. Approached from one end, the viewer encounters an industrial pump apparently filling the space with silicone while the opposite vantage reveals a monitor with a closed-circuit view inside. Playing with notions of the readymade and the fabricated, the realistic and the absurd, Kraus transforms the museum space itself into a model that may or may not exist.

Marlo Pascual, Untitled, 2009
Pascual's sculptures bring together vintage portrait photography and domestic objects with dramatic lighting and sleek armatures to create a series of discrete tableaus wherein actors and actresses from the anonymous past are recast into roles that hover between the glamorous and melancholy.

Meredith Nickie, Reversed Fortune in the Failure of the Visible, 2009
Enlisting the fanciful ornamentation of chinoiserie and baroque design, Meredith Nickie's installation juxtaposes Minimalist tropes-including a direct reference to Sol LeWitt's cube forms, mirrored pedestals, and industrial finishes-with a select array of fetish objects and interior design motifs that recall the history of colonial oppression as well as Nickie's own self-fashioned narrative of postcolonial recovery.

Xaviera Simmons, 3 (Cardboard, Masonite, Twine, Paper, Paint), 2009
Simmons captures a slowly disappearing urban landscape from three different entry points. Having gathered and broken down over a thousand cardboard boxes from city streets, the artist's gleaned materials construct a monochrome wall that stands opposite three panels of collaged photographic images taken while engaged with people and places along her route. Documenting shop signs, buildings, and street scenes, her installation is a meditation through image and text on increasingly obsolescent typographies, sayings, and locales.

Marianne Vitale, Landswab Over Berberis, 2009
Vitale's sculptural practice evokes an idea of the natural world remade from what has been discarded and abandoned, often resulting in make-shift structures and hybrid figurative creatures that can appear both fragile and menacing. For SculptureCenter's courtyard, Vitale has constructed a large-scale sculpture of steel, plaster and fiberglass coated with a copper-color finish and perched atop a sprawling garden of plants and wild grasses. This newest work is part of an ongoing interest in the vernacular, mythological narratives, and the grotesque.

Erik Wysocan, (A thing of only one age) Res unius ætatis, 2009
Samuel Madden's 1733 publication Memoirs of the Twentieth Century-one of the first science-fiction novels and set to take place in the year 1998-serves as the impetus for Erik Wysocan's installation. Wysocan also draws from the letters of Ahcene Zemiri, the so-called "Millenium Bomber" along with Madden's own correspondence with Lord Chesterfield on the nature of time travel and 18th century law. Employing different modes for presenting artifacts and specimens-from lightboxes to a table vitrine and retail display case-Wysocan reconsiders the content of the form in placing the lacunae of history on display.

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Mike Kelley and Mike Smith: A Voyage of Growth and Discovery

SculptureCenter, NY and West of Rome, LA are pleased to present Mike Kelley and Michael Smith's: A Voyage of Growth and Discovery, a collaborative video, sculpture, and sound installation. The exhibition will include a six-channel video featuring Michael Smith's character Baby IKKI filmed at a festival in the Black Rock desert in 2008. Related sculptures fill the 3000 square foot space surrounding a 30-foot tall junk sculpture of Baby IKKI. The installation features music from "Dance Beats for Baby", a new CD of music related to A Voyage of Growth and Discovery produced by Mike Kelley, with vocals by Baby IKKI. The project, a collaboration between the two artists who have been friends for twenty-five years, will be presented in both of their home cities. It premieres at SculptureCenter in NY and travels to Los Angeles where it will be presented by West of Rome in Spring 2010.

A Voyage of Growth and Discovery is co-produced by SculptureCenter and West of Rome. The installation will be presented in Los Angeles by West of Rome in Spring 2010

Performance
Camp Kid Friendly
Sunday, November 8, 5pm

Malcolm Stuart's hoop dance troupe, Color Wheel, performs with Baby IKKI, within Mike Kelley and Michael Smith's video installation. This performance is presented in conjunction with Performa 09.

Image: Grand Openings

Media Contact:
Nickolas Roudané t 718.361.1750 f 718.786.9336 press@sculpture-center.org

Opening Reception: Sunday, September 13, 5-7pm

44-19 Purves Street
Long Island City, NY 11101
Gallery Hours:
Thursday – Monday, 11am-6pm
Admission:
$5 suggested donation

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