calendario eventi  :: 

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30/1/2004

Various exhibitions

MoMA PS1, New York

Pacific Coast Highway by Richard Sigmund

P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center presents Pacific Coast Highway by Richard Sigmund, along with two recent paintings: Hudson Street Candle (1999) and Diamond (2000). Pacific Coast Highway, made in Los Angeles in 1984, is being shown for the first time in almost twenty years, and for the first time outside of California. Composed of eleven panels and fifty-three feet in length, the work gives physical sense and actual scale to its subject: the Pacific Coast Highway.

To walk past the painting is to cross almost the entire width of the highway, and hanging the work on the wall creates the sensation of an overhead view. As an image/object, it hovers between painting, photography, and relief sculpture, and between realism and abstraction. The painting implies a particularly West Coast sensibility, and expands on the work of artists such as Vija Celmins, Allen Ruppersberg, and Ed Ruscha. Pacific Coast Highway is a painting in life-size.

Richard Sigmund was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1951 and currently lives and works in New York City. Among Sigmund’s solo exhibitions were those at Eighth Street Gallery (1984), Los Angeles; Koplin Gallery (1987), Los Angeles; Ananda Ashram (1999), Monroe, New York; and Crozier Fine Arts (1999), Warehouse, Alternative Space, New York. He has also been included in group exhibitions at, among others, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (1984), California; San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art, La Jolla, California (1983); The Drawing Center, New York (1993); R Town, Brooklyn, New York (1996); I-20 Gallery, New York (2003), and Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art (2004).

This exhibition is curated by P.S.1 Curatorial Advisor Bob Nickas.


Barry X Ball: Matthew Barney

(Long Island City, New York, January 2004) - P.S.1 presents a portrait installation by New York artist Barry X Ball. This new sculptural work, titled (Matthew Barney), which presents the head of the artist carved in Mexican onyx, combines the Baroque and digital media in a portrait worthy of its subject.

Part of a series Ball initiated six years ago, this portrait is only the second completed work to be exhibited. Produced over a period of three years, the Matthew Barney sculpture began with the simple plaster cast of the artist’s head and neck. From this a positive cast was created, digitized with a 3-D laser scanner, and then the digital file was converted to machine language in order for the onyx to be milled on a computer-controlled stone-carving lathe. The sculpture was brought to completion with meticulous carving and polishing by hand.

The installation of the portrait/sculpture is central to its meaning, and relates directly to its subject. The head, impaled on a 69-inch long stainless steel spike plated in 24K gold, is suspended from the ceiling by an intricate web of cables. Recalling Matthew Barney’s early performative work, and the self-transformations in his Cremaster film cycle, Ball’s portrait also references art history. As Mario Diacono wrote, there is a parallel to "the Nun’s richly draped and levitating body in Bernini’s Ecstasy of Saint Theresa, in the church of Santa Maria della Vittoria in Rome." With elements of the grotesque and the sublime, Ball’s portrait of Matthew Barney, as it hovers in the space of the room, is suspended between heaven and earth.

Ball has had solo exhibitions at Mario Diacono Gallery, Boston (1997 and 2003); Luhring Augustine, New York (1993, 1995, 1997); Magasin, Stockholm, Sweden (1993); Galerie Isy Brachot, Brussels, Belgium (1991); Fonds Régional d'Art Contemporain, Domaine de Kerguéhennec, Brittany, France (1990); and Craig Cornelius Gallery, New York (1988 and 1986). He has also been included in group exhibitions at, among others, The Art Museum at Florida International University, Miami (2003); Le Quartier, center d'art contemporain Brittany, France (2001); Angles Gallery, Santa Monica, CA (1996); Galerie Nationale du Jeu de Paume, Paris, France (1995); Museo Cantonale d’Arte, Lugano, Switzerland (1992); and Musée St. Pierre, Art Contemporain, Lyon, France (1988).

This exhibition is curated by P.S.1 Curatorial Advisor Bob Nickas. (Matthew Barney) is courtesy of Mario Diacono Gallery, Boston.


January 31 – April, 2004

P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center is proud to present new Special Projects on January 31, 2004, including works by Christian Holstad, Justin Lowe, Tracy Nakayama, Gary Rough and David Shapiro. Special Projects are selected individually, without attention to a theme in order to reflect the extraordinary energy and variety of practices among young artists working in New York City and abroad.

Christian Holstad: Innocent Killers (2004)
Floor 2, Gallery S201. Selected by P.S.1 Assistant Curator Amy Smith Stewart.
For P.S.1, Christian Holstad (b.1972, Anaheim, California) will present a new site-specific installation. Innocent Killers (2004) is informed by the artist's Eraserheads, an ongoing series of drawings based on daily newspaper clippings, where Holstad has erased out the image and drawn over it. Recently, Holstad has been interested in depictions of microphones, as they are typically found in mass media imagery and can be interpreted as a signifier for communication / miscommunication. In his latest Eraserheads, Holstad removes the entire image except for the microphone and then adds a blank background or buzzing flies. Innocent Killers represents a deflated set for communication and consists of a microphone soft sculpture, a podium and sound component.
The work of Christian Holstad takes the form of drawings, collages, sculptures, installations, costumes, performances and videos. Holstad invests in his entire process an infectious sense of sincerity and delight, playing equally on ideas of innocence, otherness and isolation, and bids the viewer to take part in a meditative discovery and recovery of the familiar turned inside out and upside down again.

Justin Lowe: Passage (2004)
Basement Vault, Selected by P.S.1 Curatorial Advisor Bob Nickas
P.S.1 presents a new site-specific installation by New York-based artist Justin Lowe (b. 1976, Dayton, Ohio). The project's central feature is a Chevy van, which has been modified by the artist in order to maximize its possibilities as a site for intimate social interactions. The three divided interior spaces comprise a sort of adolescent utopian hideout, replete with parquet flooring, a handmade rug, video projections and music. Visitors are encouraged to enter and traverse these interior spaces, and to stop and relax within the artwork. This leisurely engagement with both the customized van and the accompanying conversation pit offers a non-conventional museum experience, as the installation endeavors to increase participants' comfort and catalyze interaction both with itself and with other visitors.

Brooklyn based artist Tracy Nakayama (b. 1974, Honolulu, Hawaii) will present a new series of works on paper. Nakayama creates sensual works that explore the camp aesthetic of 1970s erotic imagery and recall the loose illustrations in the classic sex manual “The Joy of Sex.” The sepia toned portraits of her liberated anonymous icons appear free in their open and frank sexuality. Her heroes and heroines convey a sense of innocence and playfulness and bask in a utopian never land of sexual exploration. These works evoke a simple and nostalgic look back to a recent, freer past and beckon the viewer to re-examine their own ideas of pleasure and sexual autonomy. Nakayama gives the viewer a chance to share a fleeting, but triumphant moment epitomized by a simple need to fulfill a very personal desire.
Floor 2, Gallery S202, Selected by P.S.1 Curator Jimena Blazquez
Opens March 11, 2004

For P.S.1 Scottish artist Gary Rough (b. 1972, Glasgow) presents a constellation of neons titled Who is everything. The viewer, entering a dark room, is surrounded by neon signs whose light light emanates from behind, creating an interesting interplay of light and shadow. The signs are inspired by New York neon imagery such as a tooth, scissors, and many other forms which typically promote commercial enterprise on New York streets.
Breaking away from traditional methods of presenting neon, Rough utilizes the light and shadow effect to create a romantic and poetic atmosphere out of banal mercantile signage. Because none of the images Rough selected have a definitive meaning, the viewer is impelled to interpret them in many different ways. Thus changing the viewer’s reaction from passive to active, Rough challenges the daily visual bombardment of street advertising.

Image: Richard Sigmund, Pacific Coast Highway

P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center
is located at 22-25 Jackson Ave at the intersection of 46th Ave in Long Island City, 11101. New York

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