|
Tanya Bonakdar Gallery: MARK DION : The Octagon Room | MIROSLAV TICH� - 16 Feb 2008 to 15 Mar 2008 Current Exhibition |
||||
|
Mark Dion
The Octagon Room, 2008 mixed media installation, approximate footprint 20 x 20 feet |
|||
|
||||
|
||||
|
Gallery 1 MARK DION The Octagon Room February 16 - March 15, 2008 Tanya Bonakdar Gallery is very pleased to present The Octagon Room, a major installation and sculpture project that will comprise Mark Dion's fourth solo presentation at the gallery. Dion�s dynamic and conceptually rigorous art making practice primarily serves as an investigation of the historical methods of representing and organizing the world, with particular sensitivity to man�s sometimes tenuous relationship with nature, society and the environment. Employing scientific conventions of investigation and display in order to deconstruct them, the politics of museum representation has always taken a central role in his practice - and in certain projects the physical act of realizing the work via pseudo scientific or curatorial endeavors. In The Octagon Room, which takes the form of an architecturally scaled installation, Dion furthers his investigation into the blurred boundaries between art, society, and history, as well as the homogenized methods of their presentation and consumption. Confronting the inherent contradictions between the artifact and the context in which it is displayed, The Octagon Room takes the appearance of a brutalist styled bunker. However, within the installation the viewer is invited to browse though an abandoned office, the contents of which represent the artist�s own labyrinthine history of the past eight years. Dion�s decision to utilize this octagon structure was inspired by the 19th century mania for octagon buildings, popularized by the American phrenologist Orson Squire Fowler. Fowler championed the merits of octagonal homes over rectangular and square structures in his widely publicized book, The Octagon House: A Home for All. In the end, octagon houses never took hold and, rather, these eight-sided homes seemed to be the choice of the individualists, standing defiant among their four-sided neighbors. The imagined provenance of each of the objects in Dion�s arrangement adds up to a staggering sum of experiences. As each speaks of an individual past, collectively they present a complex mosaic, informing our understanding of the overall subject matter and material. A wunderkammer both autobiographical and sociological, The Octagon Room takes the nation�s relationship with its own people and its neighbors, and the artist�s status and position within this framework as its foundation. Based in New York City and Pennsylvania Mark Dion's notable recent projects include Systema Metropolis, Natural History Museum, London, 2007 (solo); Seattle Vivarium, part of the Olympic Sculpture Park, Seattle Art Museum, 2007 (solo); The Natural History of the Museum, Carre d'Art, Nimes, France and touring to Dunkers Kulturhus, Helsingborg and Seedamm Kulturzentrum, Pf�ffikon, Switzerland, 2007 (solo); The South Florida Wildlife Rescue Unit, Miami Art Museum, 2006/7 (solo); Classification: Alternative Knowledge and Contemporary Art, Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation, Miami, 2006/7 (group); Ecotopia: The 2nd ICP Triennial of Photography and Video, International Center of Photography, New York, 2007 (group); Drawing as Process in Contemporary Art, Smart Museum of Art, Chicago, 2006 (group). Dion is currently developing and ongoing project with the John Bartram Association that will result in the exhibition Mark Dion: Travels of William Bartram Reconsidered, Bartram�s Garden, Philadelphia, June 21st - December 6th: Gallery 2 MIROSLAV TICH� February 16 � March 15, 2008 Tanya Bonakdar Gallery is very pleased to present its first solo exhibition of selected works by Miroslav Tich�. Born in 1926, Miroslav Tich� spent close to three decades (1960s-90s) in a small Moravian hometown working outside the conventions of contemporary art to create an incredibly compelling, experimental body of photographic work. After attending the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague in the 40s, Tich� was soon alienated by the political regimes of the time in Czechloslovakia. At some point in the 50s, he moved away from the avant-garde paintings of his student years and, as Barry Scwhabsky writes in his 2005 Artforum review of Tichy�s first major museum exhibition at Kunsthaus Zurich, �practically reinvented photography from scratch.� Using self-made cameras, constructed from tin cans, bottle caps and plastic, Tich� captured the poetry of everyday life in photographic images. Making only one print from each negative, Tich� created compositions featuring mainly anonymous female characters who lent themselves unwittingly to his practice. Taking mothers, students, waitresses and others as his live models, situated on park benches, sunbathing, or even on TV screens, these intimately scaled black and white prints often feature hand-drawn details and a washy, mottled print quality. Some of the works feature elaborate ink or watercolor, cardboard framing elements. The resulting works fall dynamically between painting and photography, between image and object, embracing chance, and time in a unique process of presentation and production. While Tich� certainly employed the representational nature of photography, and exploits the inherent voyeurism of the medium, his works transcend the limitations of film as documentary tool. Again, from Schwabsky�s Artforum piece, �What counts for him is not only the image- just one moment in the photographic process- but also the chemical activity of the materials, which is never entirely stable or complete, and the delimination of the results via cropping and framing. Tich� makes all these aspects visible through their imperfection, not unlike the scratching, clotting, and smearing that Roland Barthes identified as Cy Twombly�s way of making matter �appear� (in the sense of taking the stage) in his paintings.� A major solo exhibition at the Kunsthaus Z�rich in 2005, has been followed by several important international exhibitions including a current solo show at Magasin 3 in Stockholm, and upcoming solo shows at the Museum for Modern Kunst in Frankfurt, as well as the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. Tich� will also be featured in the upcoming Biennale of Sydney, at the Kunsthaus Bregenz, KUB Billboards, Miroslav Tich�, 23th of March - 1th of June 2008 ; the National Gallery of Czech Republic: International Triennale of Contemporary Art, Opening June 2, 2008; Douglas Hyde Gallery Dublin: solo show, opening November 21, 2008 (through January 22, 2009). |
||||
re-title.com
International contemporary art
SIGN UP FOR NEWSLETTERS
SIGN UP for ARTIST MEMBERSHIP
SIGN UP for GALLERY MEMBERSHIP
Click on the map to search the directory