Curated by Michelle Levy
Opening Reception Saturday March 24, 6–9pm
Interview with Michelle Levy by Lilly Wei and art images in exhibition catalogue available at opening
March 21–April 3, 2012
ONE ART SPACE, TRIBECA
23 Warren Street – Street Level
TriBeCa New York, NY 10007
646.559.0535
www.oneartspace.com
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A snapshot of recent work by Queens College MFA students, Pertaining to the Character is an exhibition that calls upon the imbued characteristics of things. These things are materials: whether they be discarded objects, natural bodies, architectural structures, ancestral crafts, forms of currency, paper, or paint. The artists, hailing from diverse backgrounds, all show great respect for the characteristics of the materials they source, exploiting the potentials of transformation.
As if extending directly from the earth and its systems, these twenty artists, working in painting, sculpture, drawing, photography, installation, and social practice, demonstrate a sincere bond to physicality, exploring the boundaries of the character of things in order to create new experiences. A number of themes repeat throughout such as references to heritage and to craft; the dialog around the re-use of materials; a fixation with water, and awareness of the environment; plus a fascination with the qualities of a medium in itself and its ability to describe that which is indescribable.
Using hand-labored craft to investigate values of form, Joyce Chan and Karen Cintron re-imagine objects associated with their immigrant heritages: Chan by breaking down and transforming the ubiquitous materials from her parents’ Chinese restaurant into new forms; Citron by re-creating the crafts and aesthetics of her Peruvian history that she has only had exposure to second-hand. Pablo Alvarez and Jing Liu meticulously reincarnate discarded ephemera: Alvaraz flattens and weaves dozens of soda cans into a shiny, brilliant metal quilt; while Liu cannibalizes printed material from postcards and ads, converting them into hundreds of bizarre worm-like fragments that bombard our senses.
A herd of record albums climbs up the wall as part of Sol Aramendi’s installation dedicated to the once tactile, intimate experience elicited from cultural objects like records and books –one that dissipates as we settle in to a digital age. Such exploration of modern alienation through the re-contextualization of media occurs in Chris Esposito’s “newspaper drawing” consisting of a page of the NY Times completely obscured and overprinted with illegible text, bleeding into ink and image, turning news into sinister abstraction.
Infusing theatrics and personality as a means for satire: Henry Kielmanowicz melts down discarded glass, transforming it into bizarre forms that recall comic-book post-apocalyptic aesthetics, as a means to comment on environmental waste; Aaron Schraeter’s paintings play with the darkness of human emotion, isolating and transforming expressions of fear into something uncanny and unsettlingly endearing; while Osaretin Ighile builds visceral figurations out of refuse, in this case gigantic pigeons of plastic buckets, burned wood, and metal cans, that, simultaneously humble and regal, appear to rise up out of a contemporary urban myth.
Electing optimism, the theatrics of Barrie Cline’s Microtopia project uses re-purposed materials as building blocks that are painted and transformed, catalyzing community interaction through the process of imagining dream cities. This intention of positive exchange carries through in Seth Aylmer and Jose Serrano-McClain’s Trust Art project that distills the idea of currency, using it as a symbolic object to explore alternative notions of value and exchange.
Some of these artists take an observational distance, creating newly invented renderings that elaborate on and re-imagine perceptions of palpable forms: Liz Pasqualo creates abstract painted universes inspired by transparent objects that refract light; Kara Szemelynec overlays translucent films of detailed line drawings of the vaulted recesses of cathedrals, creating a simultaneously disorienting and sublime experience of intersecting shapes; Kaitlyn Kelty transforms, through projected video, the meditative sensory experience of moving drops of water; while also fascinated with water, Kristie Hirten explores physical and emotional associations of the human form in water, in this case a photograph of bodies of swaddled in sheets and submerged.
And finally, there is pure abstraction based on exploration of innate characteristics of the material or medium itself, whether paint, or plaster, metal or string. Marthe Keller and Joanna Sztencel explore the potentials of paint and gesture: Keller constructs awkward hand-tools that make repeated marks throughout her work, revisiting the same gestures in different grounds and contexts; Sztencel, a once realistic painter, now challenges notions of perfection and relishes in the essence of pure paint, pigment, and surprise. Thea Lanzisero and Amanda Shea play with the physicality of sculpted materials, Lanzisero combines metal forms with woven or crocheted rope and string, posing an interference between delicate and forceful; Shea works with ambiguous forms and mutable materials such as plaster, wire, and latex, aiming to express emotions that are equally ambiguous and mutable.
