PRESENTATION: Aspen Part II

The group exhibition “Aspen Part II” expands Marianne Boesky Gallery’s longstanding engagement with the Colorado town’s vibrant art community. Featuring new works by the Haas Brothers, Sarah Meyohas, and Celeste Rapone in the temporary space on East Hyman Avenue, the presentation showcases a selection of formally, materially, and technically inventive work from across its program. 

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Marianne Boesky Gallery Archive

With a selection of new “Bronze Accretions” and “Microslimers”, the Haas Brothers continue their investigation into the slippery divide between art and design with their signature humor, whimsy, and originality. Inspired by processes of layered accumulation found in the natural world-in things like coral and tree fungus-the artists produce their “Accretions” by brushing wet clay onto dry clay in layers, amassing the uniquely textured surface by hand over time. To produce a similar effect in bronze, the artists have developed an innovative process, loosely based on ceramic coil building. To color the cast bronze sculptures, the artists apply a chemical patina to the surface of the works, creating natural variations in rust to achieve the desired colors and effects. Inspired by a stone carving of a snail at the Batalha Monastery in Portugal, the Haas Brothers’s new blown glass and marble “Microslimers”, like many of the artists’ creatures-offer a deeply personal reflection on family. Crafted in riotously colorful blown glass-an entirely new material in the artists’ practice-the “Microslimers” emerge from ornate cast bronze or carved marble shells. With buggy eyes and emotive expressions-and witty titles-the mollusks are at once humorous and heartfelt. In a selection of new works, Chicago-based painter Celeste Rapone (imbues uncannily flattened scenes with autobiographical details, art historical references, and artifacts of daily life, surrounding female subjects with detailed depictions of pizza boxes and used mayonnaise packets, ripped plastic cups and glasses of red wine, hair clips and single shoes. Rapone’s figures contort impossibly within their spaces, their limbs pushing against the frame as the artist tests the boundaries between figuration and abstraction. For the Aspen presentation, Rapone has made four site-responsive paintings, drawing motifs from imagined summer retreats to mountain resorts. In bright-almost garish-summer colors, the artist depicts women napping in fields of wildflowers, lounging in front of magnificent mountain views, hunting for truffles, and searching for treasure with metal detectors. In their pursuit of leisure, Rapone’s figures are pushed to the foreground, threatening to spill out toward the viewer. But there is a darker undercurrent to these paintings as well-Rapone’s layers dark, muted colors over the brightness, implying that all is not as it appears on the surface. With new “Light Speculations”, conceptual artist Sarah Meyohas pushes her ongoing photography series to new heights. Throughout her practice, Meyohas considers the production of value, the nature of exchange, and the romantic resonance of the sublime. With her Speculations series, Meyohas examines the alchemical nature of value production, using tunnels, voids, and water as potent metaphors for exchange. Originally conceived as a backing for Bitchcoin, Meyohas’s erstwhile cryptocurrency, the Speculations conceptually occupy a space of emerging technology. Yet, the works themselves are in fact analog C-prints. Meyohas, who studied photography at Yale, creates these images in a studio-utilizing lighting, smoke machines, and two-way mirrors to produce the illusion of endless tunnels. The images themselves allude to the deep mine shafts associated with traditional mineral sources of value, as well as abstract, contemporary economic systems, from cryptocurrency “mining” to the blockchain itself. With her newest “Light Speculations”, Meyohas integrates additional sources of light into her studio setups, bending and tilting the voids and tunnels, lending them a newly realized uncertainty.

Photo: Sarah Meyohas, Interference #8, 2022, Holograms, 35 x 48 x 4 3/4 inches, 88.9 x 121.9 x 12.1 cm, © Sarah Meyohas, Courtesy the artist and Marianne Boesky Gallery

Info: Marianne Boesky Gallery, 616 E Hyman Ave, Aspen, CO, U.S.A., Duration: 26/7-4/9/2023, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-18:00, https://marianneboeskygallery.com/