Location One is
proud to present In the
Making, featuring new
individual installations by Karolina
Kowalska, Lovisa Ringborg, Yasuko
Toyoshima, and Joana Villaverde.
Curated by Claudia Calirman
In The Making
January 13–February 5, 2011
Opening Reception January 12, 6–8pm
Free and open to the public
Location One
26 Greene Street, NYC
(between Canal and Grand)
Subway: Canal Street (N-Q-R, 6, J-Z,
A-C-E)
Karolina
Kowalska (b. Poland) deals with the
bombardment and saturation of visual
information in consumer society. Her
new series of large digital
photographs, titled An Unexpected
Breakdown of the Advertising Market,
re-imagines the streets of New York
absent of their major source of visual
pollution: advertisements and
commercial images. To create the
utopian world of her photographs, she
removes all visual and written
information, replacing them with empty
white space. In this phantasmagorical
city, billboards are transformed into
abstract geometric constructions.
Temples of consumerism, such as Times
Square, Chinatown, and Chelsea
resemble modernist grids from an
earlier era.
Kowalska’s works
are usually shown on billboards as
site-specific interventions,
challenging accepted ideas about
copyright and public spaces.
Lovisa
Ringborg (b. Sweden) explores states
of mind that are at once familiar and
unsettling. In her installation
Figurines, she creates an uncanny and
emotionally disturbing tableau
exploring children’s mannequins.
Without providing a defined narrative,
her work raises questions about
childhood, its complexity and its
ambiguous states punctuated by moments
of abandonment, solitude, and magical
bewilderment.
In her signature
works, Ringborg manipulates digital
photographs to create a sense of
disorientation and otherworldliness;
these images suggest poetic spaces
inhabited by young creatures veiled in
reverie and mystery.
Yasuko
Toyoshima (b. Japan) is attracted to
games and their often-arbitrary rules.
Her new series Motion #1 is based on a
tote board from the Aqueduct
Racetrack, a horse-racing track in
Jamaica, New York. The artist plays
with the odds and wagers of the race,
recording the fluctuation of the bets
and their numbers—which are uploaded
on the tote board at 30-second
intervals—and rearranging them in her
constructed drawings. Her focus on the
fleeting moment, the bets’ relentless
velocity, and the rapid changes on the
tote board undermine and contradict
the fixed rules of the game.
Toyoshima’s work
is concerned with various systems and
structures that regulate contemporary
society. She conceptually investigates
social and cultural frameworks that
are taken for granted, such as systems
of measurement and financial markets
in order to reveal how these
frameworks are much more subjective
than they appear to be.
Joana
Villaverde (b. Portugal) creates
spaces that lack a sense of proportion
and proper scale. In her installation
You Took from Me All the Air So I Can
Breathe, an empty chair and a
doorframe stands before a canvas,
dwarfed by the large dimension of the
portrait of a woman’s face. Although
there is plenty of room between these
objects, the gallery space becomes
suffocating: the woman is too big for
the painting in which she is
entrapped, the chair is too small for
its empty surroundings, and the door
frame creates nothing more than an
illusion of a place.
Villaverde’s
works are often variations on the same
theme: people in a space in need of
more space. This closeness or
suffocation, however, is more a mental
than a physical one. Villaverde brings
forth an intense sense of narrative
and dialogue to the viewer using the
plainest elements: a canvas, a chair,
and a wooden frame.
Location
One is extremely grateful to The
New York State Council on the
Arts, The
New York City Department of
Cultural Affairs, The Hasselblad
Foundation, Sweden, The Polish
Cultural Institute in New York,
the a-i-r laboratory at the Centre
for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski
Castle in Warsaw, Poland, Trust
for Mutual Understanding, The
Asian Cultural Council, and The
Gulbenkian Foundation, Portugal
and media sponsor OneArtWorld.com
ABOUT LOCATION
ONE
Based in the Soho
arts district of New York, Location
One is an independent, non-profit
organization dedicated to fostering
new forms of creative expression and
cultural exchange through exhibitions,
residencies, performances, public
lectures and workshops. Traditionally
focused on technological
experimentation and new media,
Location One's residencies and
programs have favored social and
political discourse and dialogue, and
acted as a catalyst for
collaborations. With a unique
environment providing individualized
training, support, and guidance to
each artist, as well as exposure for
their creations and collaborations,
Location One continues to nurture the
spirit of experimentation that it
considers the cornerstone of its
mission.
