Three exhibitions
dal 2/4/2007 al 27/4/2007
Segnalato da
2/4/2007
Three exhibitions
A.I.R. Gallery (old venue), New York
Lemperts six recent video pieces are both smart and playful. In Seeing the Light McFarland continues her exploration of the dress as spiritual container, expanding that vision to include sunlight-infused stoops leading to imagined interiors. Turbulent e/Motion is an exhibition of recent work that merges the genres of sculpture and drawing.
Stephanie Lempert, Beyond a First Glance + Joanne McFarland, Seeing the Light
Stephanie Lempert, Beyond a First Glance
In Beyond a First Glance, Stephanie Lempert explores communication, both literal and invented. The artist highlights small moments in which humans, objects, or animals seem to communicate in ways one might not initially see or understand. By concentrating on different existing systems of communication and inventing new ones Lempert alters the viewer's preconceptions of the world in which we live.
Lemperts six recent video pieces are both smart and playful. In Read My Lips (2005), the artist addresses the role of language as a method of communication through the anthropomorphization of the common goldfish. By consulting a speach pathologist, the artist learned to decipher, translate and repeat the words "spoken" by each colorful fish. Similarly, in ..--,-.-.--, (or New York, New York) (2006), Morse code was used to construct conversations between street lamps and city lights.
The Language of Space, a series of photographs, also address speech and dialogue in the urban space. For this series Lempert recorded converstations occurring at specific locations in New York City, transcribed the words and extracted the text from an image of the conversation's location. The artist's process and final "photograph" allows the viewer/reader both to see and read the space, calling attention to the various sounds, words and languages which make any urban space alive.
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Joanne McFarland, Seeing the Light
In Seeing the Light McFarland continues her exploration of the dress as spiritual container, expanding that vision to include sunlight-infused stoops leading to imagined interiors. Within these erotically-charged settings figures seem otherworldly, hovering between angel and shaman. In particular, an antique doll, prominently featured in several paintings, starkly black with scarlet lips, appears alternately to be master of her destiny or abandoned to her fate.
In Untendered, (the sole painting to offer a direct gaze) the subject's hands and face are joined at the heart of the painting amidst folds of elaborate material. This work speaks to the idea of the psychological independence that can lie beneath sexual or societal conventions. What at first appears to be a portrait becomes, through the quirky positioning of the figure and her magnetic gaze and blended ancestries, a statement on transcending expectations.
The primarily large scale paintings in Seeing the Light are a departure from McFarland's earlier work on paper. Through the medium of oil paint the theme of emotive radiance takes on new focus; the dress -- as a kind of psychic portal -- reaches its full fruition here.
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Phyllis Ewen, Turbulent e/Motion
Turbulent e/Motion is an exhibition of recent work that merges the genres of sculpture and drawing. Ewen combines laboratory equipment, three-dimensional drawing in wire, and scientific texts to explore natural phenomena. Cast in latex, her whimsical laboratory beakers, funnels, and tubes explore notions of containment: filling, emptying, pouring, and holding.
Works such as Fluid Dynamics and Turbulent e/Motion layer `found' text and illustrations from scientific textbooks with sculptural elements to create a three-fold visual language: object, written word, and mathematics. Ewen's texts are fragmentary, each chosen for its emotional resonance and reference to the human body; their meanings remain elusive and suggestive. Attempting to capture ephemeral moments, steel wires become linear elements to suggest, delineate, and define space between the vessel-like pieces.
In a related series, Journal Entries, Ewen take excerpts from 19th century botanical and zoological textbooks, using them to represent the observer's notes. The combination of text and fabricated specimens creates a fictionalized account of a scientist's observations. The artist's three-dimensional drawing refers to scientific notation and diagramming, as wells as to the hand of the artist herself, suggesting a continuum between art and science. Ewen explains, "Our attempts to contain experience and the impossibility of permanence are issues that resonate with how I experience my place in the natural world."
Image: Joanne McFarland
Opening: Opening: Tuesday, April 3, 6:00PM - 8:00PM
A.I.R. Gallery
511 West 25th Street New York
Tuesday through Saturday, 11am to 6pm