ART CITIES:N.York-Lyric on a Battlefield
Bringing together artists working in various media, from multiple regions, and of different generations, the exhibition “Lyric on a Battlefield” focuses on the poetic first-person account of lived experience, to explore the complexities of being in the world. Mirroring the experimental and subjective nature of that form, the works included propose idiosyncratic methods of making visible critical, though complexly personal, interactions between the self and other.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Gladstone Gallery Archive
Through their translations of poetic reflection into the visual forms of painting, sculpture, drawing, and photography, the practices of the participating artists expand intimate explorations of desire, social relations, and the environment. Each of these works propose a singular point of view to the viewer; one that asks them to empathize with the life of another as the means to understand the more obscure, complicated aspects of being that inform shared experience. While the lyric seemingly favors the aesthetic over the political, this exhibition seeks to understand how formal experimentation and analysis provides space to reimagine the life of the individual and ethical connections in a time of precarity. Suzanne McClelland is most widely known for her deft use of linguistics and her sensually textured surfaces. She mines the ways in which communities speak, collecting language and choosing words that trend, are debated, heard on street corners, and absorbed from streaming news feeds; words that are rich in meaning, that reach and multiply, that drop in and out of everyday life. The words she selects hover between materials; letters press up against each other, run off the surface, join together, dissolve, loop, and collide into and onto themselves. Kelly Akashi’s sculptural objects bear a complex relationship to geometric and industrial forms. Impressionability, material memory, decomposition, and putrefaction are terms that are often used to describe her interest in materials and processes that negotiate the tricky territories of permanence and monumentality within the history of sculpture. Many works in her oeuvre pit traditional materials against their ephemeral counterparts. She often casts organic materials in bronze, an iconic medium of traditional sculpture, and displays these pieces alongside works using short-lived materials such as candle wax. Anne Collier combines still-life photography with techniques of appropriation in meticulously arranged compositions. Photographed against flat, plain surfaces in her studio, found objects (record covers, magazine pages, appointment calendars, and postcards) reveal Collier’s interest in the mass media and popular culture of the ‘60s, ‘70s, and ‘80s. Informed as much by West Coast Conceptual art as by commercial product photography and advertising, her deadpan pictures (which are often humorous and subtly self-reflexive) present a set of formal and psychological associations that frame recurrent tensions around power and gender. While the lyric seemingly favors the aesthetic over the political, this exhibition seeks to understand how formal experimentation and analysis provides space to reimagine the life of the individual and ethical connections in a time of precarity. Participating artists: Kelly Akashi, Ellen Berkenblit, Louisa Clement, Anne Collier, Bracha L. Ettinger, Anish Kapoor, Liz Magor, f.marquespenteado, Suzanne McClelland, Dawn Mellor, Monique Mouton, Senga Nengudi, and Kandis Williams.
Info: Organizer: Miciah Hussey, Gladstone Gallery, 515 West 24th Street, New York, Duration: 23/6-28/7/17, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.gladstonegallery.com
