GALLERY GUIDE Exhibition: In Practice: Under Foundations
IN PRACTICE: UNDER FOUNDATIONS Rosa Aiello, Mary Walling Blackburn, Nanna Debois Buhl, Catherine Czacki, Ben Hagari, Sol Hashemi, Madeline Hollander and Alexandra Lerman, Janelle Iglesias, Ryan Johnson, and Xu Wang.
Situated in the SculptureCenter’s lower level, the work in Under Foundations share an interest in what lies beneath the surface—the repressed, discarded, ignored, the roots or the source. Many of these works speak to unconscious desires, while others seek to trace, discover, and examine the past. The exhibition evokes a storage space of forsaken objects, Opening Event: but full of stories and discovery. On the whole, the works present an archaeological search Saturday, January 24, 2015 for the elusive origins of the creative endeavor, always concealed below the immeasurable 5–7pm strata of cultural history. Incorporating the knowledge of various disciplines— psychoanalysis, behavioral science, economics, and affect theory—the impulse, act, and Gallery Hours: Thursday – Monday, 11am–6pm process of making becomes an integral part of this pursuit. They look to psychological states, everyday movements and behaviors, art historical touchstones, and deep-seated Admission: desires as points of departure. Yet, none neatly align with the accounts of these fields. $5 suggested donation Exhibition Dates: January 25 – April 13, 2015
Media Contacts: Adam Abdalla / Andrea Walsh Nadine Johnson & Associates adam@nadinejohnson.com / andrea@nadinejohnson.com 212.228.5555 Ben Whine press@sculpture-center.org 718.361.1750 x117
For these artists, the desire to locate the fountainhead of the creative idea still compels despite knowledge of history's failed attempts to fix a starting point. Each project is undertaken with the understanding that the beginning of something is also usually the end of something else, and only comprehensible in relation to what came before and after. The work is deeply embedded within histories of production, circulation, and reception, which make their own claims of cause and effect. Under such circumstances the search for an origin becomes circular, enchanting, and at times dizzying; a spiral. The process of making folds into itself, reverberating with previous steps and historical precedents. This pursuit of a source in the face of futility is always already an attempt to create meaning on the shifting ground that is our contemporary world. This unearthing of origins of making is undertaken by these artists in a variety of ways. Several artists undermine traditional notions of creative authorship: Sol Hashemi embraces open source and collectively authored modding communities (groups of computer enthusiasts that modify software and hardware) and Madeline Hollander and Alexandra Lerman re-appropriate copyrighted movement, rejecting intellectual property claims. Catherine Czacki's subtly altered readymades—often paired with texts about their retrievals—trouble the division between found and made, confusing a clear starting point
for the object. Others plumb the politics of production: Xu Wang's re-carving of classicalstyle sculpture made in China for a Western audience to disclose art's involvement in the global economy, and Nanna Debois Buhl maps the former industrial neighborhood of Long Island City with the obsolescing technology of cyanotype in an homage to the first woman photographer. The work of Rosa Aiello and Janelle Iglesias engages with the abundance of representations circulating in the world, eschewing claims to originality. Aiello's otherworldly computer generated animations are born of sophisticated algorithms and a silicon chip, yet exude a thoroughly somatic experience, while Iglesias reveals the fluidity and heterogeneity of form -- undermining the idea of any essential, primordial, or most 'true' form of the arch. Underground desires emerge in various works. Ben Hagari playfully dramatizes the romanticized narrative of the artist's journey through physical, psychological, and existential struggles, and Mary Walling Blackburn conjures images and objects as an inundating response to the call of subterranean libidinal urges. Ryan Johnson’s scale shifting sculptures evoke the childhood origins of the formation of the psychological self, with the forces of mounting drives bubbling below the surface. Jess Wilcox SculptureCenter 2014-15 Curatorial Fellow
WORKS IN THE EXHIBITION Rosa Aiello’s CGI animation Serving Water (2015) offers sounds of non-linguistic vocalizations: heckles, shrieks, sighs, applause, and more, juxtaposed with imagery that alternates between emphasis on space and surface and evocations of the body—shadows, outlines and imprints. For Aiello the invisible body is equally capable of cinematic and narrative presence as is the visible body—it is simply a matter of how we read the traces it leaves on its environment. The artist considers the unsettled implications of understanding computer graphics as immaterial, focusing on the ways that CGI and other realist forms of image production conceal the marks of their makers. The work proposes that the body is not a closed system, but rather semi-permeable and subject to the transmission and contagion of vibrations from outside. More than just the medium of communication, the body's haptic nature is both its own source of stimulus and the site of pleasure. Mary Walling Blackburn presents Study Towards the Reconstruction of Edna St. Vincent Millay's Lost Ivory Dildo (2015), a project inspired by the story that the poet’s younger sister destroyed the cherished object, perhaps in a fit of jealousy. It includes a series of prints the artist created imagining the form of the disappeared dildo as well as a website from which to browse this speculative archive and a client application platform for potential collectors to purchase an interpretive replica of ESVM's dildo. The replica would be created by an authorized carver from legal ivory, such as fossilized walrus or mastodon tusk. The project also includes a sculpture made of walrus baculum (penis bone). Photographs suggesting methods of engagement with the sculpture are available throughout the gallery and at the front desk. Weaving the potentially apocryphal anecdote into the production of a new series underscores the modes of desire in the process of commissioning, making, possessing, and connecting with objects.
Nanna Debois Buhl’s Botanizing on the Asphalt (2015) takes as points of departure Walter Benjamin’s description of the occupation of urban wanderer or flâneur and the work of unsung 19th century botanist Anna Atkins. Considered by some the first female photographer, Atkins is known for the cyanotypes published in Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions. As a means to embody a feminized version of Benjamin's flâneur, Buhl generates a cyanotype “herbarium” using refuse that she encounters on walks through Long Island City, mapping her path throughout the terrain, while documenting the changing post-industrial landscape of the neighborhood. The project continues an ongoing series that explores the flâneuse (the female equivalent of the flâneur), accumulating and articulating narratives of the contemporary urban living under a feminine gaze. Buhl weaves together time, patience, and attention as the necessary components of solarization photography, botany, and flânerie. Catherine Czacki’s Ghost Gives (2015) is an accumulation of discarded objects that she has altered in simple and modest ways to resuscitate their vitality. She employs papiermâché wraps or appendages to mass-produced objects producing a pulpy organic texture out of their former sterile anonymousness. She also creates 'subtracted objects' carving away the primitivist likeness of wooden tchotchkes, rescuing them from a degraded state. With these adjustments and revisions Czacki points to our present day systems of exchange and value of materials. Concurrent with the increasing planned obsolescence in technology and the continuous stream of commodities made for waste, Czacki's work puts forward that what may seem like the end of an object's life cycle is rather its rebirth into a new stream of circulation. A booklet of the artist’s writing available at the front desk accompanies the work, drawing out the ‘low plane’ domestic and bodily associations and considerations of material trajectories. Ben Hagari presents a single channel video, Potter's Will (2015), an allegory of the vertiginous quest that is the creative process. The film reveals a ceramist, master potter Paul Chaleff, in a studio throwing clay on a wheel. Physical forces are reversed in this world. The room spins while the wheel is still. After the spiraling room reaches a dizzying speed, it suddenly throws the viewer in a new scene in which now the artist himself, covered in wet clay trudges forward, through, over and around obstacles. He walks towards a fire, his clay-clad body steaming from the heat. In the kiln clay turns to stone—its own geologic precursor—rigid, solid, and inert. The ceramic will then face the forces of erosion, which slowly wear it down to earth once again, a parallel to the cinematic loop and artistic appropriation of previous ideas and forms. For The View from Mauna Kea (2015), Sol Hashemi built a computer that is externally cooled by sculptural works hung as panels within the passage's architectural nooks and set within shelves as small-scale assemblages. The devices incorporate heat sink materials— aluminum alloys, copper, and marble—highlighting each material's utilitarian properties. Engaging with the generative and collaborative impulse of maker communities, Hashemi produces a step-by-step build log of the process to be shared with others online. The basement with its heavy thermal mass provides a perfect location for the piece and will be used to maximize computing performance. The title references a dormant volcano in Hawaii that is the home of several astronomical observatories, suggesting that access to the nexus of natural forces associated with site is a matter of perspective. Hollander through performance and Lerman through sculpture, explore the ways physical movements negotiate their limits in the everyday systems of technology, intellectual property law, and sport. Their focus on the formation of new body languages generated by
the evolution of interface design, ergonomics, and mediated daily rituals is juxtaposed with an exploration of two of the most traditional forms of art—clay and dance. Their collaborative piece Illegal Motion (2015), engages with the exhibition space by capturing and displacing the body through sculpture and performances. Alexandra Lerman creates terracotta tablets based on the exhibition floor plan that use “touch-screen gestures” to record the circulation patterns, as well as clay ‘memory negatives’ of the performers’ bodies that both document and signal to the body. Madeline Hollander choreographs movement sequences that draw from globally recognized corporeal vocabularies such as Apple’s Touch Screen gestures, the TSA’s ‘patdown’ procedure, and sports referee penalty signals, among others. The performances take place throughout the corridors of the space, each sequence looping continuously as though doing laps in a pool or running a track, while taking directional cues from the sculpture. The loop trajectory throughout the galleries undermines the notion of any definitive start or origin of movement. Through excessive repetition, the movements gradually breakdown and slur into abbreviated, more "efficient" forms of their original selves. Janelle Iglesias’ The Only Way Out is Through (What Doesn't Bend Breaks) (2015) is a series of sculptural arches running throughout the length of the basement’s middle tunnel. The work makes references to the shape found in various manifestations: triumphal arches alluding to the strength of the architectural form; arch of the body, suggesting to flexibility; functional objects, the archetypal bow for arrow slinging; natural phenomena, like rainbows; and everyday objects such as magnets or Slinkys. The arch derives its physical strength from its diffusion of force. Iglesias takes up this dispersive, distributed logic in the representational realm: the installation functions as a cursory taxonomy of arches. An investigation of this fundamental architectural shape through the means of mass culture suggests Walter Benjamin's unfinished tome The Arcades Project and the ongoing nature of cultural criticism. The uncanny familiarity of Ryan Johnson's archetypal figures—lovers, fathers, mothers and the world of enlarged curios, novelties, and children's toys allude to the home as the site of psychological development. For Ball and Cup (2015), Johnson creates a procession of sculptures: A dog, laid on a emergency stretcher, (or is it a royal litter?), with a newspaper in mouth as tangled insides rise from its belly; an existential wooden pull-toy with a distressed figure, arms and legs outstretched, enclosed in its circular body and spins when rolled around by the rope handle; a just too large guitar with a knot in its neck hanging from a wall. The spatial compression, reminiscent of Modernism, suggests being out of one’s time as a productive seed for making. The basement, the architectural manifestation of subconscious, is an apt site for his replaying of enigmatic scenes reminiscent of an infant imaginary. For Xiawa and Dawei (Eve and David) (2014-2015), Xu Wang engages with the craftspeople of Quyang, a district in China with a large economy devoted to quarrying and sculpting marble. The area hosts dozens of schools devoted to replicating Western classical styles and icons for consumption in the West. Wang intervenes in the system, recycling sculptures that had been discarded for flaws, carving away their bodies and visages to create portraits of the Chinese workers who produce them. A video documenting the process accompanies the two sculptures. The title uses the Chinese names of the biblical figures the sculptures depict, suggesting the process of translation that occurs in creation. Exposing the paths of production and circulation in the global economy, the piece complicates our understanding of where sculpture originates.