Contents: Complicit || Balancing Act closing || twain closing reception || Sky’s Limit opening
Complicit, 2012
wood, acrylic, pigment, graphite, 96″ x 48″ x 48″
(Based on Giambologna‘s 1582 sculpture “Rape of the Sabine” in the Loggia dei Lanzi, Florence.)
Without trying to over-think or overstate my intent, as is my want, while developing “Complicit” I was thinking about Western methods of icon representation, namely billboards and the utilitarian, schematic and architectural systems we use to present imagery. Comparing this to the often propagandistic, large scale sculpture of the late Renaissance I was taken with the flat frontal quality of modern imagery. In an effort to confound this a bit I pulled three separate views of the original “Rape of Sabine” sculpture from the internet, isolating each figure from a different image and angle. This facet of the sculpture engages with the ways of seeing influenced by online imagery and academia, i.e. flat popular imagery used to partially describe three dimensional objects.
As usual, the pattern comprising the center character has been pulled and expanded from the decorative engravings found on a rifle breech. In both this piece and Coercion (see below) I have turned the violent character into the pattern man.
Balancing Act, a two-person show with Texas Tech University professor emeritus Ken Dixon and Ryder Richards, is currently on display at the Center for Contemporary Art in Abilene, Texas. The exhibit will be closing on the 14th of December.
For more images of Balancing Act you can visit my Art 2012 page.
In other news, The Art Foundation exhibit twain will be closing on December 15th. We will be holding an artist talk at Gray Matters on Thursday, December 13 from 6-7:30 p.m. We will be featuring the artist Richard Patterson, who often works with alter-egos as another facet of his practice and the Brooklyn, NY artist Shaun “El C” Leonardo, known for his art performance roles as a professional luchador, football player, boxer, and dancer, most recently performing a one man play. Hopefully, we will provide a few unique ways to consider the role of alter-ego and duplicity in art during the evening’s events.
Shaun “El C” Leonardo_ performance photo
The Cube will feature the exhibit Sky’s Limit on Friday, December 7th as part of the First Friday exhibition series held at the RAiR compound. Sky’s Limit will feature a series of works by Dallas based artist Andrew Douglas Underwood and a video work by Ryder Richards. Interested in the notation of the sky and the subsequent degradation or failure to fully capture it’s complexity, the artists both offer studies of the sky relevant to emotive perception and the modern art discourse.
Underwood’s series of eight drawings are inspired by his historical research into the work of Luke Howard, a meteorologist who in 1802 developed the nomenclature system for clouds. Set to music, each drawing offers an stipled system of patterning at once abstract and accurate. Simultaneously, the drawings are photographed and printed out, allowing one further step in the process of documentation, notation, and degradation from the original source. Richards offers a video piece recording the sky’s coloration changes. Seeking through digital means the pure perception of James Turrell’s installations, the work also provides the familiar format of a colorfield painting while sidestepping the need for traditional media.