VIRGINIA OVERTON
The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum Founded by Larry Aldrich in 1964, The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum is dedicated to fostering the work of innovative artists whose ideas and interpretations of the world around us serve as a platform to encourage creative thinking. The only museum in Connecticut devoted to contemporary art, The Aldrich has engaged its community with thought-provoking exhibitions and education programs throughout its fifty-two year history.
Board of Trustees Eric G. Diefenbach, Chairman; Linda M. Dugan, Vice-Chairman; William Burback, Treasurer/Secretary; Diana Bowes; Chris Doyle; Annabelle K. Garrett; Georganne Aldrich Heller, Honorary Trustee; Michael Joo; Neil Marcus; Kathleen O’Grady; Lori L. Ordover; Martin Sosnoff, Trustee Emeritus; John Tremaine Alyson Baker, Executive Director Larry Aldrich (1906–2001), Founder © 2016 The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum and Amy Smith-Stewart Published by The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum 258 Main Street Ridgefield, CT 06877, USA 203.438.4519 aldrichart.org ISBN: 978-0-9976615-2-1 Design: Gretchen Kraus Copy Editor: Jane Calverley Photography Support: Chris Manning Printer: Quad/Graphics, Inc. Photos by Tom Powel Imaging Cover The dead Eastern white pine utilized in the exhibition Virginia Overton, 2016, in its original location on the grounds of The Aldrich. Back Cover The dead Eastern white pine after being felled in 2015 for use in the exhibition Virginia Overton, 2016. Opposite: Virginia Overton, Untitled (Cleavage), 2016 Courtesy of the artist
Virginia Overton Curated by Amy Smith-Stewart May 1, 2016, to February 5, 2017 The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum
Virginia Overton is generously supported by White Cube and Freymond-Guth Fine Arts, Zurich, and is part of Site Lines: Four Solo Exhibitions Engaging Place, which has received major funding from the Anna-Maria and Stephen Kellen Foundation. Additional support is provided by Danbury Audi and DEDON, and CTC&G (Connecticut Cottages & Gardens) is the official media partner.
VIRGINIA OVERTON
The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum
(left to right) Untitled (Log Stand I); Untitled (Log Stand II); Untitled (Log Stand III), 2016 Courtesy of the artist Commissioned by The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum 2016 4
Virginia Overton Untitled (The Aldrich), 2016 by Amy Smith-Stewart
More and more, working seems to be like performance; not in the sense of presenting a process, but in the conditions required to complete a piece. -Fred Sandback 1 Working picks up some internal necessity at those points where the work makes itself so to speak. -Robert Morris 2
A pick-up truck (Virginia Overton’s own) is parked on four sheets of four-by-eight-foot mirrored glass crushed under its weight, illuminated by green neon installed underneath its chassis (White Box, 2008). An inkjet acetate print of wavy blonde hair (the artist pressed her head onto a flatbed scanner) is wrapped around a florescent light tube (2009–15). A ladder (from Overton’s studio) is squeezed horizontally between two walls, so it hovers over a concrete floor (SculptureCenter, 2009). A sheetrock wall is carpeted floor to ceiling in fragrant red cedar planks harvested from Overton’s family farm (Mitchell-Innes & Nash, 2013). A wood floor pattern is assembled to mirror the design of an elaborate glass ceiling (Kunsthalle Bern, 2013). A 400-foot brass tube shadows the hilly curves of a hay field (Storm King, 2014). An operating fountain built from reprocessed elements recycles water flowing between a preexisting circular pool and the roof’s run off (MOCA, North Miami, 2014). As these examples indicate, Virginia Overton is a site-reactive artist. She makes sculpture, installation, video, and photography that relate to and interact with a venue’s architecture and defining landscape. Ultimately, what she achieves are works that are implicitly site-referential. She incorporates indigenous readymade objects or elements scavenged on or around the premises, transposing the energy encapsulated within such items. For Overton, “art is just a rearrangement of matter and a declaration that it is ‘art.’”3 By doing so, she also seeks to underscore an environment’s unassuming or extraordinary aspects by exploiting the behavior and sensory characteristics of the material. Although she does not often title her works, she sometimes adds a parenthetical, typically to describe the lead material(s) or the nature of its activation. This allows the work to be open-ended and also to stress its evanescence. Her interventions are about what is happening at that moment as they maintain a dimensional experience predicated on a “being there” aesthetic. Wood—that which Overton retrieves, wooden boards, pressure treated wood beams, sealed clam wood, plywood, parquet flooring, and that which she has hewed, Douglas fir, cedar, whitewood, and pine—is a primary and recurring material in her decade-long career. Organic matter with an evident connection back to the land, it hosts a range of perceptual histories and olfactory traits. Wood communicates high and low utility, importance, and quality. It is behind our walls and on our kitchen floors; it is commonly consumed for fuel; and in its most refined state, it is a coveted feature of interior design and collectible furniture and objects.
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Overton uses wood to attain both spectacular spatial “events” that utilize native architectural details, and in combination with other recovered elements to form sculptural assemblages that elevate logs, planks, and beams to specimen and artifact. The material is always active, “on the job,” performing a deliberate action: squeezed between two columns to form a triangular shape, dangling in slings just above head height, interlaced and piled to activate a room’s corner, or stabilizing large sheets of plexiglass to frame a “view.” Overton prefers “stuff” often associated with a construction area or artist’s studio—pipes, two-byfours, plexiglass, fluorescent fixtures, ratchet straps, ladders, and chairs—and maneuvers them so they lean, bend, press, or balance against extant supports, defying their own gravity and mass. Draining them of their normative role, she imparts them with a new functionality, yet remains mindful of their essential attributes as they often appear in an “as is” state. Overton manipulates the structural dynamism of a given subject, making do with what she finds in order to generate a formal spectacle that weds native elements to a specific locale for a temporal period. Overton spent her formative years on a farm in Lebanon, Tennessee, which instilled in her an innate sensitivity to the land, its inherent economic value, and an intuitive understanding of the energetic potential to be harnessed and reaped from her environs. Her art practice is equally informed by art historical precedence: Minimalism (site-activation), Process Art (on-site activity), Earthworks (ephemerality), and Feminism (cultural relativity). Her sculptures and installations seem minimally composed, but their engagement with the surfaces of a space, its lighting, walls, windows, floors, and ceiling—as well as its exterior and the landscape—generate a maximalist sensation from an efficiency of means. Performative by nature, her chosen materials are stimulated by the specificity of their situation. Overton, like Richard Serra, uses “action [as] language.”4 Her predilection for common building supplies, her affinity for forms that are balanced and measured, along with her ability to direct energy and forge tension and evoke a relational charisma, is representative of work by the influential sculptor Jackie Winsor. The inclusion of chance, the response to circumstance, the physical labor, and the work’s temporality are also reminiscent of Robert Morris’s minimal pieces from the 1960s. Moreover, her ability to shift dimensional experience by stressing existing architecture is evocative of Gordon Matta-Clark’s “cuts” into derelict buildings, which formed alternative fields of vision and opened up sight lines to vistas elsewhere, and Bill Bollinger’s elegant material enactments, which challenged the boundaries of what a sculpture could be. In the end, Overton makes work that accentuates and alters the spatiotemporal relationship between viewer/ occupier and site/architecture. Overton’s approach to the exhibition process is a combination of inquiry and on-site decisionmaking. Experimenting in situ and in the studio, she collects found and recycled materials and subjects them to a careful choreography of research, testing, and retesting of their purpose, history, and context. A recent exhibition at White Cube gallery in London included room-size installations, comprised entirely of locally sourced whitewood planks that flexed and pressed against the walls until they arced and bowed under pressure, reshaping the gallery and making the wood look flexile. At The Kitchen in New York City, she spent a week in their archives, backrooms, offices and storage, gathering items like pedestals, old floorboards, and rigging pipes to conceive sculptures that played off the galleries’ interiors. This was evidenced in Untitled (2009), where she wedged eight pedestals of varying dimensions between two walls so they floated magically mid-air. During her nearly three-year preparation for the exhibition at The Aldrich, Overton made countless visits, and spent extensive time in the archive, scanning files on the history of the Museum’s Sculpture Garden from
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the late 1960s to early 2000s. What she learned was the trigger for several of the sculptures. Overton describes her exploratory approach as being “largely about interpretation of the place and the materials that I have at hand. I try to put all of it through a sieve and see what shakes out.”5 Overton has realized thirteen site-responsive sculptures and a video within the galleries, on the surrounding campus, and on the roof. Each informs the other as the works reverberate throughout The Aldrich’s galleries and grounds, offering multiple vantage points. Perched atop the Museum’s signature pitched roofline, which emulates the adjacent historic Colonial homes that line Main Street, is a commissioned weathervane, part of an ongoing series initiated by Overton in 2013. She perceived the weathervanes as a way to both compose a sculpture that could channel a force of nature, wind, but could also act as a “signifier” of her intervention within the setting. Overton’s first weathervane was made for the Kunsthalle in Bern, Switzerland; it depicted the mudflap girl,6 an icon of trucking culture in America—and perhaps the artist’s alter persona, a “perfect” conduit for the mythological divining power of the winds. Her second weathervane was fitted to the rooftop of White Cube’s Mason Yard gallery. The emblematic image there was the cedar tree, harkening back to an earlier sculpture crafted from Juniperus virginiana harvested from her family’s property. As could be said about many of the pieces Overton has made over the years, these works embody both the history of a distinctive locale and the artist’s singular biography. The ornamental feature of The Aldrich’s weathervane, Untitled (After Grosvenor) (2016), is her interpretation of a Xerox copy of an anonymous hand-drawn rendering of Robert Grosvenor’s monumental 1968 sculpture, Untitled, on a circa 1980s map of the Museum’s Sculpture Garden, where it was on view from 1968 to 2003.7 Grosvenor’s aluminum over steel structure, painted a sunlit yellow enamel, spans 18 inches x 18 inches x 100 feet. Its aerodynamic form was described as a “bolt moored to the ground” that appeared as if it could “fly through the air like a jet taking off.”8 Overton’s sculpture “shrinks” a monumental Minimalist sculpture into a decorative element that functions as a wind instrument, an ornamental beacon for the exhibition and the Museum’s history, a tribute to both Grosvenor and the New England locale. Fabricated out of copper by a local Connecticut welder, it will patina over the exhibition’s duration, mimicking the lightning rods on “Old Hundred” (the historic house that formerly contained the galleries, and is now the Museum’s administrative building). The directional letters on Overton’s weathervanes to date are rendered in the host institution’s graphic font, so as to forever memorialize their site relativity. One of the centerpieces of the exhibition is an outdoor interactive sculpture, a suspended log—the ten-foot-long, two-foot-diameter debarked trunk of a felled Eastern white pine from the Museum’s grounds—that swings from a free-standing steel armature. The 73-foot-tall, 52-year-old tree, long dead, but still remaining on the property’s perimeter, provided the starting point for the exhibition and materializes in many of the works. Felled by a local arborist, it was sawed into sections at Overton’s direction. After the logs dried, the artist debarked and cleaned the trunk; working collaboratively with a fabricator and engineer, she designed a framework for the sculpture based on a photograph of a 1930s playground log swing. Overton had for many years wanted to make a “sculptural translation of the ‘swing’ as a ‘suspended log.’”9 It was serendipity when she happened upon an archival black and white photograph of Robert Grosvenor sitting astride Untitled, as well as countless other images of children hanging on, climbing upon, and resting within outdoor public artworks at The Aldrich. Of course, these sculptures were never meant to be touched, but Overton wanted to provide a facet within her exhibition that was communal, reciprocative, and sanctioned play, recalling the large swing structures that nestled inside Mark di Suvero’s monumental steel
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forms. Visible from the Project and Balcony Galleries, the sculpture is situated within its original (natural) habitat. The swing offers participants alternating encounters, depending which way one sits or straddles: the reverberating transparency of the building’s expansive glass, or views to the perimeter’s dense tree line. Tucked along the stonewall that separates the grounds from the parking lot is a five-foot-tall stump, the remains of the Eastern white pine. Noting the ease in which it could be repurposed as a readymade pedestal, for Untitled (Two pipes), 2016, Overton fitted a ten-foot-tall polishedbrass tube and a slightly smaller galvanized-steel pipe upon the stump. Simply held together by a scaffold clamp, the phallic forms extend out into the open sky. The work not only commemorates its regeneration as a prop for art, but also a site for a symbolic temporary action. From afar, the erect pipes, typically hidden inside buildings or underground, look as if they levitate, in a compelling mise en scène. Three towering totem-like sculptures, Untitled (Log Stand I), Untitled (Log Stand II), and Untitled (Log Stand III), all 2016, congregate within the double-height area of the Project Space. Each contains elements from the felled white pine. The logs are clamped to slender steel stands (recycled from the outdoor fountain Overton made for MOCA, North Miami) that vary in dimension from 12 to 18 feet tall. The Project Space is the most dramatic gallery in the Museum; its ceiling height varies from a standard 12 feet to a commanding 24 feet; sizable windows stretch up 12 feet from the floor, animating the back corner of the room and framing the scenic grounds beyond. The logs seem to soar and charge the room. Two of the sculptures are positioned in front of the window, in dialogue with the pastoral “scene” beyond. The tallest work is placed before an expansive white wall observable from the Balcony Gallery. Looking down from above, the logs match our gaze, their palpable vitality on display. Here, their surfaces bear a resemblance to fossils or “dinosaur bones.” 10 On the entry wall in the Project Space is one of Overton’s signature light boxes. The fifth in the series, Untitled (The Aldrich), 2016, it spells out THE ALDRICH in black vinyl letters and illuminates one end of the gallery. The light boxes are made as an acknowledgment to every solo appearance Overton has made at an institution. This is an on-going body of work and as the years pass it will serve as a living CV, an advertisement for each museum that has supported her throughout her career. Three sculptures within the galleries integrate substantial logs from the felled pine. Overton uses them both as a sculptural component and a support. In Untitled (Log with flowers), 2016, an antique Capodimonte porcelain floral centerpiece with a missing foot —a kitsch collectible given to her by the owner of a barn sale as a gesture of goodwill after he couldn’t part with any of his merchandise —rests on top of a simple wooden shim upon the vertical log. Overton’s gesture, which refers back to the regenerate stump, reads perhaps as an offering to the dead tree or an overture to celebrate its reincarnation. In the stairwell that connects the Project Space with the Balcony Gallery is an unexpected architectural feature, a triangular sliver that cuts from the wall to the balustrade, creating a wedge that offers a suitable corner for Overton to intercede. Using yet another sizeable log as a base, the rounded surface of Untitled (Log with pipes), 2016, is covered with nearly three dozen brass, copper, and black iron pipes (parroting the stained woods in the stairwell) cut down to palm size. Ranging subtly in dimension, from half an inch to no more than six inches high, they are huddled tightly together at the center. Overton took advantage of the multi-height perspective—at eye level the
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pipes illustrate an exposed root system or the pine’s crown; from the landing above, they resemble a radiating pattern simulating the tree’s growth rings. Depending on which way a visitor enters or exits the exhibition, it starts or finishes with a short video, Untitled (Timber), 2015, a six-second loop that stars the dead white pine just as it is about to fall. The sound of the tree as it is breaks ricochets off the walls of the adjoining gallery. Here, we confront Untitled (Cleavage), 2016, a hefty core slab of the white pine mounted at eye height. Its expressive surface reveals where the chain saw struck and the trunk broke. The skeletal form of the pine wondrously reemerges in Untitled (Log with bamboo), 2016. Overton chose two dead bamboo fronds from the Museum’s grounds, one with its leaves intact, the other entirely barren, and arranged them on another upended log so as to slice into the room. The sculpture is backlit by a fluorescent light fixture (retrieved from the Museum’s basement) that emanates a soft daylight glow. There’s a special blend of humor underlying Overton’s object choices, which at times suggest a hint at a personal narrative. For instance, in 2013 she filled an old bathtub in a Chelsea gallery with water, heated throughout the exhibition by a coffee maker. For Untitled (Horse Country), 2016, Overton purchased a circa 1950s white Formica countertop from a salvage store. It was propped against the wall for a year in her Brooklyn studio, until she discovered a vintage plate of a black stallion at a junk trade sale in Seattle that “reminded her of the blowing hair of the mudflap girl” 11 —a persisting motif. She inlaid the plate in the Formica, transforming a domestic surface into a wall sculpture turned “equestrian painting” that conveys a befitting wink to the numerous horse farms surrounding The Aldrich. Whether reflecting the architectural features of a gallery or the contours of a natural landscape, Overton assesses the material—studying and learning its concrete properties, seeing how far it can go, how much it can withstand—as it is processed through countless hours of experimentation. Once installed, her space-shifting sculptures and installations produce shadows, light leaks, scents, and sound echoes that, through a process of re-articulation, demonstrate the inherent being-ness of an object, its perceptibility, its connection to a specific place at a particular time, inviting the viewer to navigate it anew as elements emerge and vanish from up close and at a distance. Virginia Overton was born in 1971 in Nashville, Tennessee; she lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11.
Fred Sandback, Fred Sandback (Munich: Kunstraum, 1975), pp. 11–12. Robert Morris quoted in “Some Notes on the Phenomenology of Making,” Artforum, April 1970, p. 62; reprinted in Robert Morris exhibition catalogue by Michael Compton and David Sylvester (London: The Tate Gallery, 1971), p. 115. Virginia Overton, quoted in “Virginia Overton and Mai-Thu Perret In Conversation,” in Virginia Overton: Deluxe (Dallas: The Power Station, 2012), p. 66. Virginia Overton, quoted in “Virginia Overton and Lisa Le Feuvre In Conversation,” in Virginia Overton (London: White Cube, 2015), p. 69. Ibid., p. 66. The mudflap girl is a now widely popular and pervasive symbol of trucker culture in America. Sporting a “perfect 10” figure, her hair waving in the wind, she first appeared on the mudflaps of truckers’ rigs in the 1970s. It is now permanently on view in the Fields Sculpture Park at OMI International Arts Center in Ghent, New York. “Art: Sculpture,” Time magazine, August 2, 1968, p. 44-47, illus. Email with artist on March 28, 2016. Conversation with the artist in the studio on March 10, 2016. Email with the artist on March 28, 2016.
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Previous Page Untitled (Suspended log), 2016 (The Aldrich Sculpture Garden installation view)
Untitled (Two pipes), 2016 (The Aldrich Sculpture Garden installation view) Courtesy of the artist
Left to right clockwise Untitled (After Grosvenor), 2016 (The Aldrich roof peak installation view)
Untitled (Log with pipes) (detail), 2016 Courtesy of the artist
Courtesy of the artist Commissioned by The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum 2016 12
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(left) Untitled (The Aldrich), 2016 Courtesy of the artist (right) Untitled (Log with flowers), 2016 Courtesy of the artist opposite (left) Untitled (Horse Country), 2016 Courtesy of the artist (right) Untitled (Log with bamboo), 2016 Courtesy of the artist 14
Works in the Exhibition All dimensions h x w x d in inches Untitled (Timber), 2015 iPhone video, color, sound; 6 seconds Untitled (After Grosvenor), 2016 Copper, steel, brass 42 x 34 x 34 Exhibition copy Commissioned by The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum 2016 Untitled (Cleavage), 2016 White pine 20 x 23 x 6 ½ Untitled (Gourd stand), 2016 Gourd, wooden wedge, pipe clamp 5 ¾ x 12 x 2 ⅜
Untitled (Log Stand I), 2016 White pine, steel 135 x 112 x 24 Commissioned by The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum 2016 Untitled (Log Stand II), 2016 White pine, steel 167 x 127 x 24 Commissioned by The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum 2016 Untitled (Log Stand III), 2016 White pine, steel 182 x 144 x 24 Commissioned by The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum 2016 Untitled (Log with bamboo), 2016 White pine, bamboo fronds, fluorescent light fixture 80 x 176 x 164
Untitled (Log with pipes), 2016 White pine with brass, copper, steel, and aluminum pipes 65 x 21 diameter Untitled (Suspended log), 2016 White pine, steel 10 feet x 9 feet x 5 feet Commissioned by The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum 2016 Untitled (The Aldrich), 2016 Lightbox 12 x 96 x 6 Untitled (Two pipes), 2016 White pine, brass, galvanized steel 15 feet x 23 inches diameter All courtesy of the artist
Untitled (Horse Country), 2016 Countertop, plate 24 ¼ x 72 ⅛ x 7 ¼ 15
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