STUART
HAWKINS
Broken Welcome
Zach Feuer Gallery is pleased to present Broken
Welcome, an exhibition of new photographs and video by New York and Nepal
based artist Stuart
Hawkins.
South and West of the teaming urban center of
Kolkata, India lies the former village of Rajarhat, now a failed planned
community with the globally acceptable name of Newtown. Declared at its
inception to be a city of the future, it was advertised as a dewy oasis of green
and calm where one could live and work in all the gated comfort that post
millennial India might offer. Driving through Newtown today, one thinks of
a dystopic landscape littered with machinery and unbuilt or unoccupied
buildings. In place of people, cows have come back to graze as grass
begins to cover the abandoned construction
sites.
In Stuart Hawkin's new photographic work,
Finishing Touches, the artist imagines the life that might have been or
be. Using simple low tech props (paper, brooms, or pillows), the roof top
gardens and driveways with smooth sidewalks are 'completed.' Though
fragments of human anatomy are seen in the pictures, the faces of the
participants in the constructed assemblages are not, leaving the meaning of the
work to include a multitude of financially stalled global
projects.
Also on view is her new video Broken
Welcome. Based on the true stories of Newtown home buyers, its actors use
abandoned buildings as their primary stage. Breaking into song and dance, their
costumes create a theme of 'commonality' in this comedic play - a story of gain,
glory, loss, and recovery. Capturing either an ominous pause in
development or the portend of something larger, Hawkins and her participants
address such ideas with collaborative humor and
wonder.
Stuart Hawkins was born in 1969 in Norfolk, VA, and
lives and works in New York and Nepal. She has exhibited at the Schirn
Kunsthalle Frankfurt; HIAP, Helsinki; Frye Art Museum, Seattle and the
International Center for Photography, New York. Broken Welcome is
Hawkins' fourth exhibition with the
gallery.
Exhibition dates: January 14 - February 19,
2011
Opening reception: Friday, January 14, 6-8PM
