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Indepth Arts News:
"Erick Swenson : Ne Plus Ultra"
2010-04-01 until 2010-05-01
James Cohan Gallery
New York, NY,
USA United States of America
James Cohan Gallery is pleased to present a new exhibition by American artist Erick Swenson. This is the artist's third exhibition at the gallery. The centerpiece is a new large-scale sculpture, Ne Plus Ultra (2010), on view with a selection of other works dating from 2001 to the present.
With striking verisimilitude, Swenson's uncanny dioramic sculptures, inspired by the artist's childhood passion for the taxidermy animals at the natural history museum, are populated by mythical animals; these hybrid creatures are strangely familiar and yet appear to come from an entirely different realm.
The title Ne Plus Ultra translates to "No Further Beyond," is a Latin term commonly used by early cartographers to delineate unexplored territories beyond the known world - indicating both a figurative and literal "Ends of the Earth." In this new sculpture the decayed and receding flesh of a the corpse of a young deer reveals scrimshaw carvings all over its skeleton. The designs of the scrimshaw resemble an old Mariner‚s map; a ship's manifest, a turbulent seascape, hints of a cartographer‚s legend, mapped coastlines. It would appear that the bones of this animal were carved from within, as if these markings convey the information and knowledge accumulated over its lifetime and these remnants of a living being contain an entire geography or universe unto itself. As the viewer confronts this gruesome depiction of the decaying animal body, the artist draws our attention to the existential truth that just as our physical selves will one day disappear, so will the intangible aspects of our identities, memories and personal histories dissolve away.
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