Venus Knitting Art Space
Precarious Constructs
Dec 9th – Dec 18th
Opening Reception: Friday, Dec 9th, 2016 7-10PM
Performance Mis-readings / Drafting a strand: Fri, Dec 9th, 9 – 9:30 pm
Sun, Dec 18th, 3 – 4 pm
As the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben says, those who truly belong to their time are those who neither perfectly coincide with it nor adjust themselves to its demands. Paradoxically that implies that to encounter the force of the contemporary, it is essential to be both dislocated from the present, and open to the force of its inherent contingency.
Precarious Constructs includes works by artists who explore sculpture as their primary language in attempts to represent the transition from the fortuity of the present to the uncertainty and fragility of the future. Ranging from life size sculptures to minuscule wall objects, from hybrid figures to ephemeral landscapes, the artworks engage with loss, memory, trauma, impermanence, and fragility.
Inspired by ancient mythology and fairy tales of his native Georgia, Uta Bekaia with his exuberant, sculptural costumes, reinvents and re-stages long lost, never-before-documented rituals. Believing in genetic transferability of communal memory, Bekaia aims to re-connect with the ancient knowledge and impregnate it with his own experiences and new meanings.
Alexandra Leyre Mein creates unsettling hybrid forms made of human and animal body parts combined with natural and mundane objects, placed somewhere between “action sculpting” and Baroque. She utilizes Hydrostone, a quasi-instantly setting plaster, without preliminary vision of the finalized work. This process results in unfinished surfaces which resonate of an organic matter in flux, both growing and at the same time on the verge of falling apart.
Levan Mindiashvili’s sculptures embed images of experiences and memories from the many places he has lived. Some details might allude to a particular apartment in Brooklyn or a house in Tbilisi, but they are merely hermetic remnants of what once might have been a home. Rendered in pigmented Hydrocal, they visually and superficially mimic a steady, permanent concrete, yet the fragility of his chosen material outlines the temporal and ephemeral nature of ‘place’ and ‘home’ in today’s world.
Andrew Cornell Robinsoncultivates experimentation guided by engagement with the world and collaboration with peers, aiming to give shape to the dialogue between traditions of hand-craftsmanship and the aesthetics of digital modernity. He sees his work as mementos for the untold stories of people, places and events, which are erased from historical memory.
Matt Stone is drawn to dissonance and reverberation between material and meaning, as well as poetics in space and color. He thinks ofhis works as “relics of the future”, apocalyptic trophies, or maybe as objects which today seem important but in time will be forgotten.In his recent body of work he cut keys out of ebony. Keys penetrate, confer privilege and denote personal property while ebony underlie darkness and conflicted origins- altogether inaugurating a new meaning.
The small scale works of Liz Sweibel arean intimate records of activity. They draw attention to attention – given, received, withdrawn, absent. Her recycled materials, mainly recycled are saved from a premature death, and elevated, gaining dignity through their new purposes and relationships. Her work is an expression of empathy, exploring materials as her own vocabulary.
In the dimensional mobiles, Parallel Topographies, Etty Yaniv’s imagery pairs patterns she derives from nature and from urban architecture to form a hybrid landscape in which the viewer is placed somewhere between the real and the imagined, the organic and the artificial. In a process of collecting and editing, she transforms discarded materials to create new meanings. Like coded messages or excavated memories, the accumulated fragments in each layer document a particular moment in time and present new clues.
In their collaborative performance piece Amanda Thackray spins rope from paper using her hands and fingers to roll, twist, and merge long strands of paper. Milcah Bassel explores bodily and spatial relationships while providing the leverage and tension necessary to craft a continuous rope. Utilizing an excerpt from Donna Haraway's "A Cyborg Manifesto” in both written and audible form the text is simultaneously embedded and unraveled, an interaction that poses physical, conceptual, and poetic questions of tension and possibility.
Artists: Uta Bekaia
Alexandra Leyre Mein
Levan Mindiashvili
Matt Stone
Andrew Cornell Robinson
Liz Sweibel
Etty Yaniv
Performance: Milcah Bassel, and Amanda Thackray
Co-Curated by Etty Yaniv & Levan Mindiashvili
117 Grattan St. (entrance 122 Harrison Place), Brooklyn, NY 11237
(corner of Harrison Place and Porter, across from Falensai restaurant)
Morgan L stop; Gallery hours: Sat, Sun 1-4PM
More info: www.facebook.com/venusknitting