Forming Lines: Translations Between Drawing and Sculpture

Translations between two and three-dimensional space, the works in this show explore the relationship between line and form. Drawings are both reference and original; sculptures are end product or study and vice versa. This exhibition acts as a Rosetta Stone for visual translation, exploring how drawings turn out when realized in three dimensions and the ways a sculpture's color, form and scale change when documented in two dimensions.

Illusion is almost always explicit in drawings: illusory space, illusory textures, imaginary places and impossible situations are all common factors in drawings. It is easier to forget the illusions in sculpture. From tricks of perspective to deceptive finishes, sculptures aren't the honest hunks of matter we sometimes take them for.

One key difference between drawing and sculpture is that a drawing's illusions are usually self-contained, staying on the paper. A sculpture however is always engaged in symbiosis with its environment. A sculpture can make a space seem smaller than it is, dominating everything around it. The same sculpture is dwarfed by an outdoor space, looking like an abandoned toy. The perception of sculpture is easily affected by its context and vice versa, conditions of space and light drastically change our experience of a sculpture whereas a drawing is fairly independent, forming its own context.

Rachel Beach was born in London, ON Canada in 1975. She received her MFA from Yale University in 2001 and her BFA from NSCAD University in Halifax, Canada in 1998. Beach's works have been described as "tough, precise and disciplined with a hard edged cheeriness."
Seth Cohen was born in Leicester, England in 1971. He received his MFA from the Hoffberger School of Painting at the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2003. Beka Goedde received her B.A. from Columbia University, Barnard College [Sept 2000-May 2004] with a concentration in Behavioral Neuroscience and Philosophy.
Abby Goodman Received her MFA from Syracuse University in 2002, she was recently chosen by studio visit Magazine as there cover artists Dean Goelz was born in New York in 1978. He earned his Bachelors of fine arts from the Maryland Institute College of art in 2001.
Barry Hazard earned is MFA from the School of Visual Arts in 2008 and his BFA, from Tufts University in 1988. Allie Rex was born in Hartford, CT. She received her Masters of Fine Art from the Cranbrook Academy of Art in 2004. She creates drawing installations using mylar, paint, ink, pencils, vinyl and pins.
Marc André Robinson received a MFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore in 2002. His work was recently exhibited in Unmonumental: The Object In The 21st Century New Museum of Contemporary Art and in UNTITLED (on paper) at Moti Hasson Gallery in Chelsea, NY.
Rodger Stevens was born in Brooklyn, New York and studied at the Parsons School of Design (NYC) and the School of Visual Arts (NYC). His sculptures, installations, and drawings have been exhibited in galleries and museums in New York, California, Paris and elsewhere since 1993.
Kathleen Vance received her MFA from Hunter College in 2006. She has exhibited all over New York including the Betty Cuningham Gallery in Chelsea, NY.

Image:

 

Courtesy of the artist and Like the Spice Gallery, New York
 

Like the Spice Gallery
224 Roebling Street
Between S2nd & S3rd

Williamsburg

Brooklyn
New York, NY 11211

 

 

 

  

Miss Van & Victor Castillo
Canto Negro y Brujerias

26 July to 23 August 2008

Merry Karnowsky Gallery Berlin is proud to present CANTO NEGRO Y BRUJERIAS, featuring the paintings of Barcelona-based artists Miss Van (France) and Victor Castillo (Chile). The two unfold their unique but harmonious iconographies in a pictorial exercise of intersecting ideas. These artists approach from their personal perspectives subjects like seduction, desire, enchantment, and the game of infantile cruelty. The title of the exhibition attempts to unite these proposals and at the same time, alludes to Spanish culture, superstition and witchcraft as basic context, and dark invocations of common ghosts.

The "poupees" of Miss Van, always surrounded in sensational atmospheres, embody the surrounding energies of the loving spell that they seduce and catch. All are portrayed in mystical scenarios, between meditation and liberation of evil, introspection and exorcism. Through their closed eyes, we enter into the private worlds of each, reflecting on their dark side and feminine fragility. Miss Van's work has shown in the United States, France, England, Austria, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Belgium, Germany and Australia.

Victor Castillo shows us a mixture of classic and comic painting loaded with infantile personages of subjects: macabre, joy, seduction and the unscrupulous pleasures of the destruction game. At the same time he also makes references to contemporary realities and a new generation's stimulations from the increasing bombardment by the media. Castillo's work has shown in Spain, Chile, Argentina, Brazil, the United States, Canada, Belgium and Taiwan.

 

Courtesy of the artist and Merry Karnowsky Gallery

 
Merry Karnowsky Gallery
Torstrasse 175
10115 Berlin-Mitte

 

 

 

 

DOMESTIC APPLIANCE

1 AUGUST - 13 SEPTEMBER 2008
PRIVATE VIEW: THURSDAY 31 JULY 2008, 6-8PM
OPENING TIMES: TUESDAY TO SATURDAY 10AM TO 6PM

Kinetic art emerged in the 1960s from the mixed parentage of the well-oiled motor of Constructivism and the anti-art ad absurdum of Dada. On the one hand, the movement was a celebration of the artist-as-engineer; a utopian practice that gave formal expression to the energy of mechanical processes and championed a Modernism most High. On the other, it animated the anarcho-political fervour of a revolutionary post-war contingent bent on trashing aesthetic precepts and bourgeois tenets. Supreme functionality verses extreme destructiveness; the whirr of social harmony or the cacophony of a cog in the political machine.

Despite this significant lineage, it is broadly assumed that Kinetic art never really established itself beyond a contested adolescence, and that it played out this errant youth - depending on who's story of art you are reading - occupied with pseudo-scientific gadgetry or kitschy optical tricks. The footnoting of the movement in the history of 20th century art lead to its widespread dismissal in many areas of contemporary criticism, an erasure that triggered Yves-Alain Bois to declare that Kinetic art had 'suffered the unhappy fate of a flash in the pan'.
This exhibition substantiates the domestic connotations present in Bois' statement to investigate Kinetic art at a tangent to the discrete line of art history, a position located not only off the official path, but behind closed doors. Expanding the bracket of the artistic movement beyond its staunchly socio-political origins, it explores how artworks loosely grouped by the classification 'kinetic' have addressed the structures - psychological, linguistic, social and familial - that exist within the space of the home.

Whilst the domestic object can claim a legacy in Kinetic art that extends as far back as Duchamp's readymades, the significance of a domestic/kinetic interplay within a continuing field of practice has yet to be fully addressed. Here, a diverse group of artists explore the meanings generated when kinetic art, taken beyond its limitations as a finite modern movement, enters the machine for living in.

Jean Tinguely, founding father of Kinetic art in its Dadaist incarnation, and Czech artist Kristof Kintera exploit the same signifier - the power drill - to different ends. Tinguely's playful sculpture, an ode in steel and feathers to his second wife Niki de Saint Phalle, is imbued with an intimacy that hints at a private language of desire, whilst the violent pas de deux acted out in Kintera's domestic drama muddles objectification and anthropomorphism to make the viewer a voyeur, complicit - through the act of seeing - in a scene of sexual antagonism and gender politics.
The industrial aesthetic of Antoine Zgraggen's monumental destructive machines masks their role as priest-like vehicles of confession and catharsis. In the mechanical hands of these automaton analysts, domestic objects invested with traumatic memories and turbulent meanings are severed, compressed and shattered into extinction. Where Zgraggen destroys objects made faulty through their entanglement in psychic webs, Nik Ramage subverts the purpose of appliances to make them anew. Relinquishing Constructivist principles of utility and efficiency, fragility and faultiness become their bathetic function.

Max Dean, Raffaello D'Andrea & Matt Donovan pay deference to the Dadaist legacy of auto-destructive machines by creating a robotic chair that perpetually negotiates the spectrum of construction and collapse. Falling apart only to put itself back together again, the chair is a cipher of flux; neither figure nor ground, form or l'informe, it inhabits a space where the line between mechanical system and subjectivity blurs. This ambiguous terrain is also the setting for Thomas Baumann's Asilver, an object fixated on the cycle of deformation and re-formation. Doggedly remodelling itself ad-infinitum, it momentarily diverges from an abstract geometry to adopt the form of an unheimlich apparition - a domestic glitch that is the 'ghost' in the machine.

DOMESTIC APPLIANCE will be accompanied by a catalogue with text by exhibition curator Ellie Harrison-Read.

 

Flowers East
82 Kingsland Road
London E2 8DP

Flowers East