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Marianne Vitale
Burned
Bridge, 2011
reclaimed lumber, burned
488 x
122 x 92 cm
Courtesy
of IBID PROJECTS, London
MARIANNE VITALE
Too
Much Satan For One Hand
9
October - 12 November 2011
For
her second solo exhibition at IBID PROJECTS, New York artist
Marianne Vitale presents 4 large-scale
sculptures taking over 3 floors of the gallery. Too Much
Satan For One Hand illustrates a new body of work taking
its starting point from the idea of the American
Frontier.
Marianne Vitale’s multi-disciplinary practice
combines sculpture, film and video, theatre and drawing.
Cultivating a considered aesthetic of absurdity, her work
often functions as parody of cultural production, broaching a
wide array of subjects in an attempt to escape
classification.
Wood
beams, posts and boards taken from the floors, walls and
ceilings of old factories and warehouses throughout New York -
is sourced from scrap yards and reconfigured into sculptural
replicas of objects and structures reminiscent of its
historical origins. With the help of historical imagery,
outhouses, false fronts, barns, jail cells and other
architectural elements of America’s Old West are reconstructed
with traditional, often long abandoned techniques. The
reclaimed lumber, once primary building material and a
lynchpin in the country’s industrialization, is left untreated
and shows the remains of a hundred-plus years of wear and
tear. With its weathering, dirt, markings, footprints and
rusty nails, it serves as signifier of authenticity to the
country’s mythologized past and helps to turn these objects
into nostalgic and lonely monuments to that long-gone and
overly glorified pre-modern era in its’ annals.
Jail (2011) is a 6 x 6 x 6 ft cube
comprised of heavy, weathered wooden beams, piled to create an
old technique of “butt-and-pass” corners. There is no way in
or out of the chamber, only a small window, with silver bars
allow a peak into, or out of, the darkness. Based on a
specific bridge truss design from the late 1800’s, Burned
Bridge (2011), a 16 foot-long sculpture of a Northeast
American covered bridge, was built and then set aflame,
leaving behind a frail, charred skeleton.
On
the gallery’s top floor sit two 16 ft-long (4.8 m) sculptures,
Torpedo (1) and Torpedo (2), (2011). Also
built primarily out of old wood, boards were freshly ripped
thin, to fit the curved shape, as that of a wooden
barrel, though here elongated into torpedo form. The design is
loosely based on early water missile renderings from the late
1800’s.
Elsewhere in the exhibition, two diptychs,
Tongue & Groove (2010), are comprised from a pile
of “tongue and groove” boards, dismantled from a Manhattan
factory. Perhaps more than the other works these “paintings”
(as they become, hung flat on wall), communicate most
explicitly the depth and history of the “reclaimed” material
from which they are composed. Drippings of tar and cork and
oils on the "floor side" were perhaps once under a work
station of heavy machinery. The flip-side (literally) is that
of a ceiling, which makes up the other diptych; markings from
where structural beams were attached, and a faded coat of
white paint lends a painterly pattern, now puzzled
together.
Finally, a series of small canvases, Too Much
Satan For One Hand (2011), depict a printed image of the
artist’s arms and fists gesturing a “satan” symbol, collaged
with handwritten drawings, texts and markings.
Literal reconstructions that purposefully confounds
their origins, Vitale’s work proposes a flawed representation
of history and a hybridised rhetoric that leaves the viewer
confronted with a confusing sense of longing and
identification with the mythology and hysterics of a time when
an agrarian society turned into an industrialized
society.
The
artist’s book, What I Need To Do Is Lighten the Fuck Up
About a Lot of Shit (2011), has been published on
occasion of the exhibition and is available at the
gallery.
Marianne Vitale (b. 1973) graduated from the School
of Visual Arts, New York in 1995. She has participated in
group shows including Whitney Biennale 2010, The Whitney
Museum of American Art, NY, Are You Glad To Be In America?,
Massimo De Carlo, Milan, IT (2011), How Soon Now, Rubell
Family Collection, Miami, US (2010), The Perpetual Dialogue,
Andrea Rosen Gallery, NY (2009) and SUBJECT | MATTER, Cass
Sculpture Foundation, UK (2009). Recent solo exhibitions
include The Clipper, White Slab Palace, NY, presented by
Kunstverein, NY, Landswab Over Berberis, Sculpture Center, New
York (2009), OK/KO (as part of Performa ’09), White Columns,
NY (2009). Upcoming solo shows include Performa, NY (2011),
Zach Feuer, NY (2012) and UKS, Oslo, Norway,
2012.
IBID PROJECTS
35
Hoxton Square
London N1 6NN | UK
T:
+44 (0) 207 998 7902
E: info @
ibidprojects.com
Tuesday
- Friday 10 - 6pm
Saturday 12 - 6pm
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