Wave HillWAVE HILL
A public garden & cultural center
(Not So) Still Life
Artists:
Adam Brent, Elizabeth Bryant, Nicole Cohen, Ori Gersht, Jessica Jackson
Hutchins, Sue Johnson, Laura Letinsky, Beth Lipman, Erin O’Keefe, Donna
Sharrett, Nicolas Touron, Michael Vahrenwald, Rodrigo Valenzuela and Alex
Verhaest.
(Not
So) Still Life presents novel ways
that contemporary artists are transforming the still life genre to engage with
current culture. As a subject, the still life gained popularity in the Early
Renaissance as an alternative to landscape, portraiture or religious subjects.
Compositions of natural and inanimate objects were often presented with
allegorical connotations. Today, artists are creating new variations by working
in photography and sculpture to conflate interior space with landscape, or by
using video and animation to convey still life in motion. Several artists will
be creating new works that respond to the domestic interior of Glyndor Gallery,
once a private home.
To
reactivate the genre, several artists are looking directly at historic
paintings. In a new site-specific work, Nicole Cohen creates a
video overlay of an animation of 18th century Dutch master Jan van
Huysum’s, Fruit Piece (1722), on an image of a gallery window
with a view of the Hudson River that brings to life the changing and rebirth of
seasons rendered in the Dutch masterpiece.Ori Gersht’s photographs On
Reflection capture the split-second moments of creation in destruction
of exploding mirrors reflecting faithfully recreated floral arrangements based
on paintings by Jan Brueghel the Elder. Michael Vahrenwald’s
photographs from his series, Forest Floor (after Otto Marseus van
Schrieck), capture found still lifes on sidewalks in Brooklyn’s industrial
areas, in a nod to the paintings of 17th century Dutch botanist and
entomologist Otto Marseus van Schrieck. Alex VerhaestTemps Mort:
Table Props reference the vanitas imagery of Pieter Claesz and Willem
Claesz Heda, while combining contemporary technology and classical themes to
recreate visual narratives.
Other
artists are using materials such as ceramic, glass or fabric to create
vignettes to probe memory, ephemerality and other concerns of the traditional
still life genre. Nicolas Touron sets porcelain-cast
cicada carapaces in a miniature porcelain terrain composed like a still life
and containing a projection of macro greenhouse footage that conjures memories
of natural landscapes. Beth Lipman’s hand-sculpted crystalline
installation reflects modern-day notions of mortality, consumerism,
materiality, fragility, and temporality. Laura Letinsky’s candid
photographs of tabletop remnants allude to human presence in tension between
ripeness and decay, fertility and void, familiarity and distance. Adam
Brent creates whimsical domestic assemblages modeled on narratives of
personal history, place, and memory via 3D scanning and printing
technologies. Donna Sharrett deconstructs and reconstructs
worn items of deceased loved ones through meticulous handiwork of sewing,
stitching, quilting and embroidering particular elements intomomento mori textile
mandalas. Sue Johnson recreates the “American Dream” on a
dining table featuring both printed imagery and ceramic objects through
traditions of vanitas and trompe l’oeil, in an investigation of material
culture contextualized within ideals of the postwar suburban home.
A
number of other artists in the exhibition utilize the illusionistic techniques
of trompe l’oeil (trick the eye) to break the boundary between two and
three-dimensional space. Elizabeth Bryant’s photographic
tableaus feature found objects, magazine clippings and live plants in spatial
arrangements that create complex and often humorous hybrid forms. Grounded in
the history of photography as well as architecture, Erin O’Keefe’s
photographs consider the layers of distortion and optical illusion generated
from the transformation of complex arrangements in three dimensional space into
two dimensional image plane. In further dialogue with the use of spatial
effects in themes of still life, photographs from Rodrigo
Valenzuela’s Still Life series explore the way images,
such as landscapes and tableaus, are inhabited and the ways in which space,
objects and the natural world are translated into images.
Elizabeth
Bryant, Greenhouse/Golden Cheeked
Warbler, 2012, archival inkjet print, 34” x 40”. Courtesy of the artist.
Read
the press release for the show here.
