Puddle, pothole, portal
October 2, 2014–January 5, 2015
Opening reception: Sunday, October 5, 2–5pm
SculptureCenter
44-19 Purves Street
Long Island City, New York 11101
Hours: Thursday–Monday 11am–6pm
T +1 718 361 1750
info [at] sculpture-center.org
www.sculpture-center.org
This fall SculptureCenter presents Puddle, pothole, portal:
Olga Balema, Joachim Bandau, Camille Blatrix, Teresa Burga, Antoine Catala, Abigail DeVille, Jos de Gruyter & Harald Thys, Judith Hopf, Jamian Juliano-Villani, Allison Katz, Mark Leckey, Maria Loboda, Win McCarthy, Danny McDonald, Marlie Mul, Mick Peter, Chadwick Rantanen, Lucie Stahl, Saul Steinberg, Keiichi Tanaami, Lina Viste Grønli, and Jordan Wolfson
Puddle, pothole, portal is co-curated by Ruba Katrib, Curator, SculptureCenter, and artist Camille Henrot. This exhibition will inaugurate SculptureCenter’s newly expanded and renovated building. With play and curiosity, we can test boundaries and decipher our space. Bumping into objects, pushing them over, hopping over figments, falling down, we are clumsy and mischievous, like children in a world of new technologies. Incorporating a sense of wonder and humor, concepts surrounding animation and cartooning are expanded into an exhibition that enacts a similar sort of hysteria around flatness and depth in relation to technologies, real and illusory spaces—physical, virtual, internal, and external.
Thinking through early 20th-century cartoons, the kaleidoscopic drawings of Saul Steinberg, the innovative and self-reflexive film Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, and other children’s entertainment, the exhibition explores the coexistence of disparate elements within shared spaces. Gags betray complex meanings and sociopolitical satire, and unrelated objects, locales, and avatars interact in the same dimension. The works on view transcend the categories that separate drawing from sculpture, the human from the nonhuman, and the animated from the static, while experiences of technological devices and flatness lead to fantastic and absurd implications for objects and space. As screens, passageways, and shadows populate both physical and virtual realms, we question whether they are reflections or traces of the objective world, obstructions, fantasies, or entryways into other realms.
Many of the artists are producing new works for the exhibition: Camille Blatrix has created a singing mailbox that waits for an important letter to arrive, and once it does, you have to find the key to read it; Allison Katz opens a new dimension through a site-specific painting incorporating the architecture of the exhibition space; Chadwick Rantanen tempts gravity through a series of suspended objects; and Marlie Mul superimposes images of band-aids onto the surrounding environment.
The exhibition will also present Keiichi Tanaami’s sculptures for the first time in the United States, as well as bring Saul Steinberg’s prescient and influential drawings into a group exhibition of contemporary art. Coinciding with Steinberg’s centennial anniversary, Puddle, pothole, portal, considers the artist as an early figure who envisioned virtual realities, and created complex images that juxtapose unlikely characters into new worlds—often sharing them through the printed page, to the amusement and puzzlement of mass audiences.
Publication
The exhibition will be accompanied by a full-color publication with texts by Ruba Katrib; Spyros Papapetros, Associate Professor of History and Theory of Architecture at Princeton University; an English translation and reprinting of Serge Daney’s 1988 text “The Last Temptation of the Toons”; and a visual essay by Camille Henrot. The publication will be available at SculptureCenter and through ARTBOOK | D.A.P.
Public programs
On Sunday, September 28, a book launch and panel discussion with the curators and select participating artists will take place at Printed Matter’s NY Art Book Fair 2014. On December 12 through 14, SculptureCenter will collaborate with Anthology Film Archives for a screening of animation related to the exhibition.
Funding
Puddle, pothole, portal is presented with the generous support of Shane Akeroyd with additional support from Kathy & Steven J. Guttman and the Office for Contemporary Art Norway. SculptureCenter’s 2014/15 exhibition program is underwritten by UOVO Fine Art Storage.
About SculptureCenter
Founded by artists in 1928, SculptureCenter is a not-for-profit arts institution in Long Island City, New York dedicated to experimental and innovative developments in contemporary sculpture. SculptureCenter commissions new works and presents exhibitions by emerging and established, national and international artists. Our programs identify new talent, explore the conceptual, aesthetic and material concerns of contemporary sculpture, and encourage independent vision.
SculptureCenter’s major exhibition and operating support is generously provided by grants from the National Endowment for the Arts; the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council; New York State Council on the Arts; the Lily Auchincloss Foundation, Inc; Bloomberg Philanthropies; the Kraus Family Foundation; the Lambent Foundation fund of the Tides Foundation; the Joan Mitchell Foundation; The New York Community Trust; The Pollock-Krasner Foundation; The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts; the A. Woodner Fund; and contributions from our Board of Trustees. Additional funding provided by the Milton and Sally Avery Arts Foundation; Goldman Sachs; the A G Foundation; and contributions from many generous individuals.
Media contacts:
Adam Abdalla / Andrea Walsh
Nadine Johnson & Associates
adam [at] nadinejohnson.com / andrea [at] nadinejohnson.com / T +1 212 228 5555
