FOR IMMEDIATE
RELEASE
Roofless
Motifs
Harrell
Fletcher
Corin
Hewitt
Elizabeth
McAlpine
April 1–May 1,
2011
Opening reception Sunday, April 3,
7–8pm
Elizabeth McAlpine, Words & Music
(Headlines), will be performed the following
dates:
Sunday, April 3 at 4:45, 5:45 and
6:45pm
Sunday, May 1 at 4:45, 5:45 and
6:45pm
“Now this shows you the roofless motif which I think is very, very
handsome. . . . This is really the old hotel and you can see that instead of
just tearing it down at once they tear it down partially so that you are not
deprived of the wreckage situation. That’s very satisfying actually to me:
it’s not often that you see buildings being both ripped down and built up
at the same time. . . .”Â
- Robert
Smithson
In three acts of ventriloquism, chaos gives way to formalism. An exhibition
of new work by Harrell Fletcher, Corin Hewitt, and Elizabeth McAlpine,
Roofless Motifs includes performance, drawings, photographs and video
where the spontaneity of performance and the entropic forces of nature push the
limits of form. At the same time, the insistence of structuralism and our
reliance on language further defines the parameters of each artist’s
work.
In 1972, Robert Smithson delivered a slide lecture to the architecture
students at the University of Utah on Hotel Palenque, a partially demolished
construction project he came across in Mexico. Offhand, and at times droll in
its delivery, Smithson recounted the beauty and intrigue of the waterless pools,
rebar jutting out of demolished concrete walls, and roofless buildings. Unclear
if the lecture mocked academia and its fetishization of these sites or was a
genuine recount of his visit, the notorious lecture has become legendary in
Smithson’s life and
work.
Harrell Fletcher’s video, Robert Smithson: The Hotel Palenque,
covers Smithson’s original lecture, delivering its content in a drier and
more ambiguous tone. Questioning the distribution of knowledge and its
interpretation, Fletcher’s work resists traditional hierarchies, opening
up dialogues between and across political structures. The bootlegged and casual
nature of his work also suggests an irreverence toward the preciousness of the
art world that galvanizes and instantiates the
original.
Corin Hewitt’s Recomposed Monochromes are created through the
digital rendering of brown and gray organic materials such as rocks, dirt, and
twigs from a flatbed scanner. These scanned images are manipulated in Photoshop,
pushing the neutral colors to the limits of the color spectrum, and extracting
underlying hues not immediately apparent from their origin. Hewitt then prints
these vivid monochromes and composts the printouts with dirt and leaves,
returning them (as objects) to nature. The partially eroded papers are then
rescanned and reprinted creating luminous images of decomposing color and
debris. Like much of Hewitt’s recent investigations into performance,
sculpture and photography, these works confront the fixity of objects,
introducing both the entropy of decay and enacting a number of object/image
reversals.
A central work in the show, Elizabeth McAlpine’s performance, Words
& Music (Headlines), attempts to re-imagine the written word through sound.
Assigning each key on a piano to letters and punctuation points, McAlpine
transcribes the day’s news headlines into sustained musical chords.
Performed by five pianists simultaneously around an upright piano, the resultant
composition is imbued with the randomness of the translation, but also the
patterns and pace of language and current events. First enacted at the Barbican,
and then at Laura Bartlett Gallery in London, this will be the first performance
of the work in the United
States.
In a group of related drawings called News Lines, McAlpine traces
the image frames from the British dailies. Traced through carbon paper on sheets
of newsprint, these works take on the crisp, lean look of architectural
rendering, utilizing the structure of the printed paper to create new forms. As
with other works in the exhibition, a confusion persists: Are these plans for
the creation of something, or the remnants of a thing
destroyed?
Â
Harrell Fletcher has produced a variety of socially engaged
collaborative and interdisciplinary projects since the early 1990s. He has had
solo exhibitions at the Wattis Institute, San Francisco; The Power Plant,
Toronto; LAXART, Los Angeles; and White Columns and the Wrong Gallery in New
York. Selected group exhibitions include SF MoMA, the de Young Museum, the
Berkeley Art Museum, the Drawing Center, SculptureCenter, Domain de Kerguehennec
in France, the Royal College of Art in London, and the National Gallery of
Victoria in Melbourne, Australia. He was a participant in the 2004 Whitney
Biennial.
In the past four years, Corin Hewitt has produced a number of
exhibitions that operate between performance, sculpture and photography. These
projects include solo exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New
York; the Seattle Art Museum and Western Bridge, Seattle, WA; the Firehouse
Center for the Visual Arts, Burlington, VT; and Small A Projects, Portland, OR;
and a monograph produced by J&L Publications. Hewitt will have a solo
exhibition at Laurel Gitlen in September
2011.
Elizabeth McAlpine is a London-based artist
whose drawings, film-based works and performances have been exhibited recently
in solo exhibitions at Laura Bartlett Gallery, London; Eastside Projects,
Birmingham; and Statements at ArtBasel. She has been included in numerous group
exhibitions at institutions and galleries including the Barbican Art Gallery,
Thomas Dane and the Tate Modern, London; Transmission, Glasgow; East
International, Norwich; and the Kadist Foundation, Paris.
LAST WEEK: Anissa Mack, Second, closes Sunday, March
27
GALLERY NEWS: http://www.laurelgitlen.com/news.html
Gallery hours: Wednesday–Sunday, 11–6, and by
appointment
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New York, NY
10002
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