calendario eventi  :: 

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25/5/2013

Four Exhibitions

Mass MoCA, North Adams

Jason Middlebrook

May 26, 2013–Apr 7, 2014
Galleries

For the past decade, Jason Middlebrook has been exploring the complex relationship between man and nature in his sculptures, installations, paintings, and large-scale drawings. Middlebrook's interest in the state of the environment has been articulated in work that addresses the effects of human intervention in a range of landscapes, from the taming of the suburban yard to the building of the Alaskan Pipeline. References to the history of art and art-making are always present in Middlebrook's work, which has made connections, for example, between the pipeline and the land art constructed in the same period.

The show at MASS MoCA looks at the artist's recent forays into painting and will feature new works from the artist's series of painted hardwood planks begun in 2008. Meditations on both sculptural form and abstract painting, this new work illustrates a shift in the artist’s practice since his move from New York City to a more rural environment near Hudson, New York. Working both with and against the grain of his organically shaped wooden supports, the artist points to abstraction’s roots in the natural world while again emphasizing an inherent conflict or desire to control the natural form with his use of hard-edged lines and glossy, industrial colors.

Responding to the unusual scale of MASS MoCA’s gallery, the artist will be working with planks that in some instances reach tree-like heights, while others will retain a human scale. Middlebrook will also debut a new monumental, hanging mobile that will function like a fountain within the gallery. Titled Falling Water after Frank Lloyd Wright's iconic Kaufman residence, the work continues the artist's exploration of manufactured nature while adding a twist to Wright's notions of living in harmony with the environment.

This exhibition is supported by a grant from the Artist's Resource Trust with additional funding provided by the Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, Hal & Jodi Hess, Robert & Nancy Magoon, and Kent & Vicki Logan.

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Love to Love You

May 26, 2013–Jan 5, 2014
Galleries

"Fandom is less like being in love than like being in love with love." - Michael Joseph Gross

Is it possible to tell the history of popular culture, not through celebrities, sports teams, or television shows, but through their fans? The exhibition Love to Love You brings together artists who explore fandom as a unique opportunity for shared social experience and extreme personal obsession. For many, being a fan means entering a fantasy world of devotion. Fandom transcends material consumption and becomes a fictional space in which people play out their hopes and dreams. In this sense, looking at fans tells us more about the emotional and cultural attachments we form to objects than about popular culture itself.

Using a variety of artistic approaches, the artists in this exhibition explore the lived experience of fandom as both a personal and social force. These artists present fans, not as passive spectators, but active participants in culture. Whether making memorabilia, writing fan fiction, or singing karaoke, fans become creators as much as consumers of culture. By looking at the social culture of fandom, this exhibition poses questions about authorship, collectivity, and our place in the hierarchy of cultural production. Ultimately, these works ask us to consider whether fandom can be a radical site for participation in culture.

Participating artists include Mark Bennett, Eric Doeringer, Elissa Goldstone, Jason Lazarus, Eva LeWitt, Patrick McDonough, and Jeremy Shaw

The exhibition is curated by Martha Joseph, a student in the Williams College Graduate Program in the History of Art. The exhibition is made possible by the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in support of MASS MoCA and the Williams College Graduate Program in the History of Art.

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Joseph Montgomery

May 26, 2013–Apr 7, 2014
Galleries

A selection of new and existing works from three closely-related bodies of work (2010- 2013) by New York-based painter Joseph Montgomery will be on view in our Brown Gallery from May 26, 2013, through April 7, 2014. This will be the artist's first solo museum exhibition.

Montgomery creates compact abstract assemblages (many measuring only 12 x 10 inches) which have an uncanny familiarity. The small paintings vibrate with texture and movement and bursts of color amidst a mostly subdued and earthy palette. Despite their small size, the works have an intense visual and visceral impact - made from an array of elements which curve up, out, and beyond the confines of the support. Montgomery builds his layered images with a range of materials -- a base vocabulary of sorts -- including wood, clay, cardboard, fiberglass, paper, and wire. These elements take on the appearance of painterly gesture, each functioning like a brushstroke. The earliest of these works developed from the artist's attempts to veil or destroy paintings which he found too earnest or too personal. These rejected works become a support for his subsequent collages and are at times cannibalized as material fragments in newer works. Often compared to the collages of Kurt Schwitters, the constructions are indeed influenced by an early twentieth century approach to abstraction exemplified by the likes of Schwitters, Ben Nicholson, and the Constructivists, among others. Though Montgomery is deeply engaged in a discourse with the history and future of painting, his works, like those of his aforementioned predecessors, adapt materials or modes of making associated with building and architecture. Given their size and their materials, the works share characteristics with architectural models. Like such studies, they are images of potential, and seem to move back and forth between different scales, functioning on an intimate level while hinting at the monumental. Small and portable, they also have the air of devotional objects.

Each of Montgomery's works generates the next, both in concept and material. The original series of painterly assemblages led to a second group of works constructed from the common wooden shims -- like those used in both construction and art preparation -- which populate some of the collages. The elongated triangles, which Montgomery arranges vertically against a support, and paints in monochrome white and black, have the appearance of both relief and a flat canvas. Channels or troughs between the shims give the illusion that the works may be made of light and dark bands of pigment. Some create the effect of a drawn or painted pattern of lines, akin to those seen in a certain style of geometric abstraction. Playing with notions of figure and ground, the works also upend traditional mark-making, which the artist has purged from his paintings.

This shim series in turn generated a body of much larger wall reliefs constructed from pieces of cardboard. Folded like fans, in tapered patterns that resemble those of the smaller wedges, the works are reminiscent of enlarged fragments. In some, the artist tears away the outer skin of the cardboard to reveal glimpses of the corrugated pattern beneath -- before painting them with a layer of white, black, gray, or brown. In more recent works, the artist has added an additional layer of texture by spraying the compound used to make popcorn ceilings like the one in Montgomery's childhood room. This series brings to mind minimalist monochromes and also hint at the corporeal relationship between viewer and object characteristic of work from the 1960s and 1970s. Hung low to the ground, these pieces have a markedly human scale; the artist compares them to bodies, and the smaller constructions to faces or masks.

The seductive formal and material interest of Montgomery's works is matched by the ideas that inspire them; that is, the artist's investigations into the nature of the painting process and the artist's role as author. Montgomery is concerned with what he calls the "pre-determined" nature of image, and proposes that every image already exists. While the three bodies of work at MASS MoCA seem to mirror recognizable styles of abstraction and may even conjure for viewers the memory of a particular work just out of the mind's reach, the artist does not intend to consciously track a progression of painting. With no particular original in mind, Montgomery creates what he considers "representations" of other compositions both random and constructed - from paintings to photographs to architecture to visual moments found in the city streets. This bank of images are the result of what he sees as a kind of Darwinism, an evolution in which certain images survive and proliferate.

Born in Northampton, Massachusetts, in 1979, Montgomery earned his BA at Yale University in 2001 and an MFA from Hunter College in 2007. Since receiving his degrees, the artist's work has been presented in Basel, Switzerland, Antwerp, and Milan. In February 2013 his work will be featured in Painter, Painter at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. Montgomery currently lives and works in New York.

This exhibition is supported by the Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation and the Massachusetts Cultural Council.

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Guillaume Leblon

May 26, 2013–Apr 7, 2014
Galleries

On view through April 7, 2014, this first solo exhibition of Paris-based sculptor Guillaume Leblon’s work in a U.S. museum will feature a selection of works made over the last decade, in addition to two major new projects created for MASS MoCA. Leblon’s practice is characterized both by its diversity and the artist’s canny manipulation of space. While he creates powerful, discrete objects, he often choreographs his works into a larger spatial narrative within his exhibition venues.

Incorporating familiar objects into his sculptures, from tables to shelves, plywood, even the sails of a windmill, Leblon presents enigmatic constructions and combinations which have a powerful, seductive, material presence. While his works refuse a single reading, they often conjure images of the ruin and the passage of time, bringing the present and the past into contact. Leblon can transform everyday components into sculptures that attain a relic-like quality or the aura of a classical statue.

The artist’s interest in transformations has manifested itself in works that hint at a kind of alchemy. In a recent series of sculptures which are propped against the wall, the bright colors of a beach towel peek through the holes of an outer metallic surface. To create the work, the artist poured molten brass onto a towel draped on a bed of shells and sand which mixes with the liquid material. In its final static state, the material nonetheless retains the bubbling, swirling appearance of its former movement, the mundane towel enshrined beneath given a new gravity, turned into an unexpected object of worth and contemplation.

This exhibition is supported by Étant donnés, the French-American Fund for Contemporary Art with additional funding provided by the Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, Air France, and Elisabeth & Robert Wilmers.

Press contact:
Jodi Joseph, (413) 664-4481 x8113, jjoseph@massmoca.org

MassMoCA
87 Marshall Street - North Adams
open 11 - 5, closed Tuesdays
Admission
$15 adults
$10 students
$5 children 6–16
Free for children 5 and under
Free to members

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