15 Sept 2007 to 13 Oct 2007
Reception: Saturday 15 September, 2007, 6-8pm
Tanya Bonakdar Gallery
521 West 21st Street
10011
New York, NY
New York
North America
p: +1 212 414 4144
m:
f: +1 212 414 1535
w: www.tanyabonakdargallery.com
Martin Boyce, Installation view, 2007, Tanya Bonakdar Gallery
Tanya Bonakdar Gallery is very pleased to present We Make an Unsubstantial Territory, an exhibition of new sculpture by Martin Boyce, and the artist's first solo show with the gallery. Creating groupings of works that simultaneously explore the poetic beauty and the potential menace of the urban landscape, Boyce transforms the gallery into "a place out of time," a space that recalls and references conventional public areas�the playground, the highway underpass, the parking lot�but seen sketchily, as though the viewer were able to enter and explore a fleeting memory, or a fuzzy snapshot.
Both the individual works and the presentation as a whole draw from and reference a photograph that Boyce found in a book on French Modernist gardens, an image of four concrete trees created by Jo�l and Jan Martel for the 1925 "Exposition des Arts D�coratifs" in Paris. These trees, Boyce says, "represent a perfect collapse of architecture and nature," and are emblematic of his ongoing exploration of the oppositional elements of contemporary urban existence: the natural versus the constructed, the populated versus the uninhabited, the old versus the new.
Boyce finds fertile ground in investigating these dichotomies, and in his sculptural installations all the inanimate inhabitants of public spaces become characters: the phone booth, the streetlamp, the ventilation duct, the chain-link fence, the park bench, the waste bin, the ashtray, and so forth. Boyce is interested in the lives of these objects�the extent to which they are informed by the context of their original manufacture, and the alternative life they might lead if separated from that meaning. Estranged from their original purpose, Boyce's sculptures group together and form a cohesive and immersive environment, an imagined or dreamed landscape that is eerie and liminal, one that the critic Will Bradley calls, "both a proposition about social space and a dreamscape in itself."
A column installed in the middle of the gallery serves as the literal and metaphorical center of this imaginary landscape. Though it does not support the structure of the building, it is imposingly solid and simultaneously elegant, providing the most direct reference to Jo�l and Jan Martel�s concrete trees, with sail-like panels extending as Modernist branches from the column's top. A double phone booth stands nearby, the contours of its box echoing those of the "branches" on the column. Telephone booths are a disappearing marker of public space, the almost-ghosts of the urban landscape, displaced by the personal and private use of mobile phones. Here they sit quietly, evocative of both the past conversations they enabled and their increasing obsolescence today. Like its counterpart the phone booth, the ping-pong table references an outmoded original, in this case a leisure object. In opposing corners of the gallery, a text work converses with the viewer. The letters hang suspended, as though caught rearranging themselves, spelling the phrase "we appear" in one corner �and disappear,� on the opposite wall. Text also appears on the ventilation ducts that run around the baseboard of the gallery; these beautifully patterned grills are enlarged and re-imagined in the screens that further divide the space.
Living and working in Glasgow, Martin Boyce exhibits widely both domestically and abroad. Forthcoming projects include: Atelier Hermes, Seoul, 2007 (solo); Unmonumental, New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, 2007 (group); Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, UK, 2008 (solo); M�nster Kunstverein, 2008 (solo); 2 person show with Ugo Rondinone, Sculpture Center, New York, 2008. Martin Boyce can also be seen as part of M�nster Sculpture Project, M�nster, Germany, until September 24, 2007 (group).
GALLERY 2
LIKE LEAVES Curated by Caoimh�n Mac Giolla L�ith
Tanya Bonakdar Gallery is very pleased to present the group show Like Leaves, which includes works by Anna Barham, Gerard Byrne, Kate Davis, Stephen McKenna, Isabel Nolan, Bojan Sarcevic, Tony Swain, Neal Tait, Miroslav Tichy and Ulla von Brandenburg, and is curated by Caoimh�n Mac Giolla L�ith.
Vladimir: �They all speak together.�
Estragon: �Each one to itself�
This wry exchange � which, like the exhibition�s title, is gleaned from a well-known passage in Samuel Beckett�s Waiting for Godot - incidentally describes a basic condition of any exhibition of disparate art works. This loosely staged arrangement of works by ten European artists from different countries and generations speaks in a range of accents of various sedimented pasts, displacements over time, and passages through landscapes, real, imagined or metaphorical. Gerard Byrne�s on-going photographic project �A country road. A tree. Evening� takes the setting for Beckett�s classic play as a point of departure. Blithely discounting the author�s own comments on the origins of this setting, Byrne has produced a series of photographs of more or less appropriate roadsides in Ireland and France, which Beckett is known to have visited prior to the (non)appearance of Godot in 1953. Byrne�s theatrically lit landscapes find a counterpoint in Stephen McKenna�s �Small Albacora�, an oddly disquieting painting of a hotel swimming pool fringed by a crescent of empty blue sun-loungers, which has the surreal air of an abandoned stage set. Despite its contemporary setting in a holiday resort in Southern Portugal, this picture somehow retains the memory of the allegorical ruins and remains that characterized McKenna�s work in the 1980s, viewed at the time within the context of the neo-classical strain of postmodern painting. Anna Barham�s multi-part installation responds to a classical archeological site, the excavated city of �Leptis Magna�, located in contemporary Libya, fragments of which were transported from North Africa in the early 19th century and reconfigured at Virginia Water in Surrey by George V as an ornamental temple. Barham�s small-scale sculptural evocations of this ancient Roman African city, fashioned from discarded household materials, and her dizzingly animated concrete poem wrought from the words �Leptis Magna�, constitute a set of further dislocations and reconstitutions.
The sculptural elements in Kate Davis�s four-part installation resemble the fossilized remains of contemporary domestic objects unearthed by an archaeological dig in some distant future. Davis�s installations tend to build up allusively from an encounter with significant figures from 20th-century art history (e.g. Meret Oppenheim, Barbara Kruger, Faith Wilding). While her most recent engagement has been with questions of reflection and projection as raised by the �Mirror works� of Joan Jonas in the 1970s, her contribution to this show specifically addresses the photographs of Miroslav Tichy within the context of this broader investigation. Tichy studied painting in Prague in the 1940s, but led a troubled life thereafter, which included numerous stretches in prison and in psychiatric care as well as frequent clashes with the Czech authorities. For much of the 1970s and 1980s this self-declared �prophet of decay and pioneer of chaos� roamed the streets and public places of his native town in Moravia, taking hundreds of snapshots with a rudely customized camera, often focusing from afar on women sunbathing or swimming in a public pool which he was prohibited from entering. Davis�s work honours the melancholic intensity of Tichy�s distressed and worked-over images while self-reflectively �mirroring� and subtly refracting his use of the female body as icon or motif. Male and female figures alike appear intermittently in the work of Ulla von Brandenburg, sometimes in fragmentary or highly stylized form. The bodies that haunt her work across a variety of media that include film, sculpture, drawing and performance, have an air of ghostly theatricality that self-consciously hark back to the dramatic tableaux, esoteric spiritualism and fin-de-siecle symbolism that typified the turn of the last century.
Diaristic intimacy is mixed with far-flung cosmic fancy in Isabel Nolan�s sculptures, paintings, drawings and wall-hangings, which sometimes wistfully allude to faraway galaxies, while at the same evoking a cloistered world of quiet desperation and compensatory joys. Her floor-based sculpture �The unfolding moment� suggests a delicately exuberant but precarious rapprochement between the notions of containment and escape. It is obliquely complemented by Bojan Sarcevic�s more chromatically austere, wall-hung sculpture, whose formal self-sufficiency does not preclude associative flights of fancy - we may idly picture a windblown tree in late fall, a kite, or a boat under ragged sail. While much of Sarcevic�s recent work in a range of media that includes collage and film registers a conscious engagement with the historic residue of utopian modernism, this untitled sculpture has a lightness and openness that seems relatively unbounded by time or place. The rich m�lange of ostensibly incompatible styles and forms that has informed Neal Tait�s painting over the years barely begins to account for the quietly perverse nature of his imagery. Despite many obvious dissimilarities in form and facture, Tait�s work may be related, in terms of its elusive, shape-shifting character, to the paintings of Tony Swain, which are patiently built up in overpainted increments on found images in newspapers clippings, which are variously mutated sometimes almost to the point of occlusion. In comparable manner, Tait�s paintings evolve in unpremeditated ways in the course of their gradual development, often consigning their points of pictorial departure to the ghostly status of faint pentimenti. Yet, in keeping with the ensemble of works in which they are here presented, they never entirely mask the memory of bygone images or muffle the rustle of antecedent voices.
