History & Body in Copper: Nari Ward at Lehmann Maupin Gallery

Installation view, "Nari Ward, Breathing Directions"

Installation view, “Nari Ward: Breathing Directions”

“Nari Ward: Breathing Directions” uses cryptic copper charts to bring the viewer bodily into an entanglement with history. The main room of Lehmann Maupin’s Chrystie Street gallery features three large cooper sheets with mottled surfaces at the far end, in front of which you encounter what appears to be another large copper sheet, flat and more clearly patterned than the others. In fact, this installation by Jamaican-born artist Nari Ward, entitled Ground (In Progress), consists of some hundred-odd bricks wrapped in copper sheeting that has been oxidized to different degrees to create patterns. Every day a different household item is laid on top and visitors are invited to walk on it to activate the space. It’s a subtly rickety, crinkly experience, and it changes my understanding of the panels hanging on the walls.

Breathing Panel: Oriented Center (2015)

Breathing Panel: Oriented Center (2015)

These vertical pieces, called “breathing panels,” are made of oak wood covered in a copper sheet, punctured with copper nails, and treated with a darkening patina. While you literally stand on Ground, you can discern the trace of footsteps in the work opposite, Breathing Panel: Oriented Center, where shoe imprints tend to hover around the mid-center, high diamond constellation of holes and raised nailheads. The artist applied a darkening agent to the bottom of his shoes and walked across the works to create their differing levels of oxidation. Footprints bring physical presence into the work, implicating our physical presence as well as the artist’s. Walking on the patterned bricks underscores how the wall works are not representational like a traditional photograph or formal exercises like an Abstract Expressionist painting. Rather, they create meaning through their materiality which invokes the body and particular historical circumstances.

Details, Breathing Panel: Oriented Center (2015)

Details, Breathing Panel: Oriented Center (2015)

In these works, Ward represents a facet of the Underground Railroad made known to him during a visit to a church in the South. At the First African Baptist Church in Savannah, Georgia, one can still find breathing holes in the floorboards. They were created to help escaping slaves hide underneath while on their journey north. The pattern of the holes refers to Congolese cosmograms, designs that Ward also saw in the church. To me, they also suggest constellations by which one can navigate. Ward refers specifically to navigation symbols in Ground, where the patterns are derived from instructive codes used in quilts that communicated directions north. Breathing holes, defunct secret symbols, and footprints signify a specific type of illicit migration, turned here into personal invitations to connect oneself bodily to that distant history, to hear the bated breath of a darkened room of waiting bodies, to search the sky and household tokens for direction.

Installation view, "Nari Ward: Breathing Directions"

Installation view, “Nari Ward: Breathing Directions”

“Nari Ward: Breathing Directions” is on view at Lehmann Maupin through November 1. A performance organized by the artist will take place in the gallery October 4, 2015 at 3PM.

Poetics of Space: Sarah Sze at Tanya Bonakdar

Installation View, Sarah Sze at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery

Installation View, Sarah Sze at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery

Sometimes I can be a little slow on the uptake–one example of that might be when I saw Sarah Sze’s Triple Point at the 2013 Venice Biennale and didn’t think too much about it. I’m going to blame visual saturation from the overall Biennale experience. Her current exhibition at Tanya Bonakdar in Chelsea fills both floors of the gallery with her signature sculptural assemblages: often mundane things of the world arranged in careful–if unorthodox and teetering–balance with each other.

Installation View, Sarah Sze at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery

Installation View, Sarah Sze at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery

The first room of the ground floor opens up like a walk into a painter’s studio. Sheets of dried paint hang suspended, as do strings, paper, and pendulums. Slight vibrations can be seen as you pass and disturb the discrete groups of objects. Torn paper and paint splatters on the floor appear both haphazard and precise. Navigating the room is navigating a series of small events in which the action of creation is always implied and new perspectives around objects, under ladders, and in mirrors are created. It displays a mix of scientific curiosity and entropy.

Sarah Sze at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery

Installation View, Sarah Sze at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery

Beyond this exploded studio, the back room of the gallery is darkened with a few focal points, such as the desk featuring a homespun globe and a living plant in a Smart water bottle as well as spotlights created by desk lamps (pictured above). Sze often uses such generic, accessible materials to create her work.

Installation View, Sarah Sze at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery

Installation Views, Sarah Sze at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery

In this room, one of the walls opens out. Inside are a few folding chairs for viewing a projected video (as well as a glimpse at the gallery’s storage space). The video narrates aloud what is being typed and corrected in the email window. The text above describes echoes in an environment, which seems in sync with the sculptural installations that are so sensitive that they vibrate when people walk by. The viewer is implicated as a participant in the environment throughout, here by the waiting chairs.

Sarah Sze at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery

Installation View, Sarah Sze at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery

Upstairs the atmosphere is the opposite of that dark, enclosed space below. Light streams in directly from the skylight above and a relatively simple tableaux of hammock, four mirrors, chalk, and two sculptures–one heavy and one light–take up the room. If below is the artist’s work space, then this is an area of leisure and ethereal thought. Yellow, orange, green, and red paint dried upon the hammock’s blue strings hang suspended. The surface of the mirrors is also obfuscated with some pale splattered substance.

Sarah Sze at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery

Installation View, Sarah Sze at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery

Sze’s arrangements often suggest impermanence, perhaps particularly here where blue chalk lines form stripes on the wall and cover the gallery floor. A delicate arrangement of branch on top of wire on top of rock hovers on the blue ground. In contrasts a metal block sits, all scooped out and with pieces lying around it, on a plain wooden platform next to the ground, suggesting heavy mass.

Installation View, Sarah Sze at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery

Installation View, Sarah Sze at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery

Science is often mentioned in relation to Sze’s work. Certainly there is an experimental quality that seems to investigate the nature of things, and perhaps advance a view of us living in an indeterminate, mutable state. But there is also a poetics of space involved, where humble materials are arranged as carefully as words in a sonnet. The intricacy of the works rewards the viewer who can spend a little more time in the space to discover the care in the artist’s arrangement.

Up through October 17. Details here.

Narrative, Fantasy, Artifice: Curating “Emerges VIII” at ATHICA

Winnie Gier, Last Summer, 2015, Archival Inkjet Print

Winnie Gier, Last Summer, 2015, Archival Inkjet Print

Flagpole magazine recently reviewed an exhibition I curated at the Athens Institute for Contemporary Art (ATHICA) called Emerges VIII, of which I said “Rather than relaying an ordinary story, their works often suggested something artificial—perhaps with a hint of a darker underbelly, or something so removed from reality as to be in a fantasy land—thus with the clear suggestion that it is only illusion and not real. Both qualities are mildly subversive, and highly entertaining.” As ATHICA’s eighth annual exhibition of work by emerging local artists, I approached the exhibition as a chance to introduce exciting new work by younger artists to the local community. My three key words were narrative, artifice, and the fantastical.

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Installation view of Saegan Moran’s Vinyl Forest (2015, Found objects, resin, vinyl) with Winnie Gier’s photographs behind. Photograph by Emily Myerscough.

I loved having the chance to show photographer Winnie Gier‘s saturated, strange environs next to Saegan Moran‘s Vinyl Forest, both turning the natural into highly artificial states. Work by Jessica Machacek also deals with ideas of artificiality and nature–often in terms of consumerism, as one can see in the blinds displayed on the left in the image below.

Installation view of (L to R): Jessica Machacek’s Privacy Plant (2015) and Aquarium (2013), Michael Ross’s Checkered Hearts (2015), and Cameron Lyden’s Of Those Who Call the Woods Their Home (2015). Photograph by Emily Myerscough.

Machacek’s scenic window dressing with a view to nowhere exploits the idea of the picture plane as window–something Michael Ross takes up in his large narrative oil painting representing an impossible scene of soldiers wrapped in a Christmas fantasy in the midst of a snowy landscape. Although historically based, elements of glowing tree and presents amidst the tundra seems unlikely; If this is a view, it is one onto a scene of magical realism.

Detail, Cameron Lyden's Of Those Who Call the Woods Their Home, 2015. Photograph by Emily Myerscough.

Detail, Cameron Lyden’s Of Those Who Call the Woods Their Home, 2015. Photograph by Emily Myerscough.

Guns lean together on the right of the composition, abandoned, and recalling the functionless yet beautiful tools Cameron Lyden has hung from the wall to its right. His installation features carefully fashioned objects of brass and wood, resembling but not quite functioning as tools.

Ben Rouse, Untitled series, 2015. Photograph by Emily Myerscough.

Finally, Ben Rouse presents a series of 10 black and white prints that range from the whimsical to the serious. Viewers are left to construct their own meaning from the mysterious symbology of eggs and contorted body postures.

Emerges VIII is on view at the Athens Institute for Contemporary Art in Athens, GA through August 23, 2015.

Installation view of Saegan Moran's Salivia Diamonds (2015) (L) and (2015) (R). Photograph by Emily Myerscough.

Installation view of Saegan Moran’s Saliva Diamonds (2015) (L) and Vinyl Forest (2015) (R). Photograph by Emily Myerscough.

Installation view of Jessica Machacek's (2013). Photograph by Emily Myerscough.

Installation view of Jessica Machacek’s Aquarium (2013). Photograph by Emily Myerscough.