Exhibitions
THE FIELDS SCULPTURE PARK AT OMI INTERNATIONAL ARTS CENTER ANNOUNCES RECEPTION FOR "NATURE NOT/ NATURE"
The Fields Sculpture Park at the Omi International Arts Center, in Ghent, NY is pleased to announce two exhibitions: "Nature/ Not Nature" an exhibition curated by Peter Franck and Kathleen Triem, and "Bivouac" organized by Max Goldfarb.
Nature/Not Nature:
Exhibiting artists include:
Jae Hi Ahn, Jane Benson, Mary Ellen Carroll, Elizabeth Demaray*, Dan Devine*, Alex Fischer*, Baris Karayazgan, Thomas Matsuda, Nova Mihai Popa, John Powers, Lisa Solomon and Peter Stempel.
Nature/Not Nature will explore ways in which artists represent or make use of nature in the construction of outdoor art. The gamut of installations will create a dialogue revolving around the representation of nature using natural and artificial materials. Nature/Not Nature is a curatorial experiment which goes to root issues of making art constructions in an outdoor context. Questions relating to form and material will be provocative in the landscape of the sculpture park.
The Fields Sculpture Park, located on the Omi International Arts Center campus, encompasses approximately 300 acres of farmland of which 90 acres are dotted with internationally recognized contemporary sculpture. A path for viewing the sculptures follows diverse terrain from the edge of a natural pond surrounded by trees, providing a shaded backdrop to view the pieces.
Fields Sculpture Park was founded in 1998 as public grounds for viewing contemporary sculpture as part of the Omi International Arts Center. There are over 80 sculptures on view from well known international artists such as Carl Andre, Tony Cragg, Donald Lipski, Beverly Pepper and Bernar Venet. The 2007 season will inaugurate the new Charles B. Benenson Visitor Center and Gallery, a new indoor museum space to service the park. In The Fields nine year existence, it has received coverage by the international press has been quite extensive with major articles printed in the New York Times, the Financial Times of London, Sculpture Magazine and many others.
The Fields is also honored to have two pieces from the estate of the renowned artist Isaac Witkin.
* Elizabeth Demaray is doing a special project for The Fields Sculpture Park.
* A link to part of the piece, Sheep Farm, by Dan Devine: dandevineart.blogspot.com
* A link to Alex Fischer's website: www.alexfischer.net
Exit by Alex Fischer
BIVOUAC
Organized for The Fields at Omi International Arts Center by Max Goldfarb
Contributing artists:
Allison Wiese
Elinor Whidden
Kahn/Selesnick
Garrett Ricciardi
John Osorio-Buck
Mary Mattingly
Matthew Lusk
Marie Lorenz
Jose Krapp
Charles Goldman
Ross Cisneros
Michael Cataldi
Bivouac is an exhibition including a small outpost of skilled improvisational designers and essentialist bricoleurs; expeditionary artists whose works often approximate dwellings. Their sheltering forms are the trace of a civilization of dignified survivalists, poetical pragmatists and networked autonomists. A reflection in the back of a campfire tin shows a progressive compulsion to construct from the bones of a failed utopia. In circumstances where capacities to adjust to destabilized conditions are inadequate, one must pursue, with urgency, new models for survival. Neither primitive hut, nor decorated shed, these artworks serve as prototypical responses to aggravated social conditions, and as vigorous symbolic admonitions illuminating the darkness of cultural eclipse.
John Osorio-Buck is his own subject of social experimentation. Endurance, isolation, and outlaw activities are not mere affectations, but byproducts of the ingenuity of an artist that considers resourceful survival through the lens of a utopic inventor/designer. He applies his structures to performative implementation: His work implies the romantic narrative of 'the last inhabitant', while demonstrating practical solutions to extreme social conditions such as urban homelessness and displacement. Here he will present work from Utopia 7: Drop and Deploy, a set of aerial transported relief containers.
Mary Mattingly, informed by singularity theory, and visionary architectural propositions, has returned from her invented neo-medieval future of corporate monarchs and ecological devastation to file a report on how to prepare oneself for a landscape populated by clannish nomads: Wear your home, pack lightly. -Consider her cosmology as a map for applying expansive mystic insights to the survival of the everyday. Encountered in the fields of Art Omi, the downed crash materialized from Mattingly's world is a beginning stemming from the end.
Sometime collaborators, Garrett Ricciardi & Ross Cisneros, will reveal the ruined remains of a roller coaster, evoking a deflated collapse of cultural revelry. At the intersection of folly and doom, the structure sits in its incongruous pastoral surroundings as an ossified remnant of a bygone civilization: ours.
Elinor Whidden has dismantled a junked car, and transformed the carnage into a series of journeyman gear. Like a Pilgrim wading through the earth's entropic return, where a car is a dormant pile of materials to pick through, she manipulates the dead car body into a series of useful vehicles: canoe, sled, carrying pack; she embarks on perambulatory travel. If Lewis and Clarke were dependent upon John Carpenter as their native guide through the skeletal remains of a future-past, they might encounter Whidden's adapted paraphernalia. Whidden and her crew of frontiersmen have circumnavigated Niagara Falls in a group portage using her recycled vehicle-gear.
Jose Krapp makes assemblages that appear to be the result of sculptural triage. His sympathies ally him with hasty and misbegotten materials that have been grafted into tenuous, momentary building anatomies. Krapp's bivouac seems to be the lookout tower of the Lord of the Flies erected by a mismanaged branch of the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
The collaborative team of Kahn/Selesnick weave their work into elaborately scripted narratives of parallel, forgotten, potential histories; fictional heroes aspiring expeditious alternatives to the encroachment of menacing empire builders. The romantic trans-continental, and sometime interplanetary voyaging of their various mythic narratives joins the pathos of lost possibility with the enchanting optimism of future innovation and discovery.
Allison Wiese' investigations subtly undermine the barrier walls of authority, and resurface in the midst of the surprising activities found in the outer margins. Her clandestine distillery, composed of off-the-shelf parts from a home-improvement center, evokes a redneck detournement. Her wild-card application of materials redirects the resourcefulness of a suicide bomber towards a slightly dangerous and illicit form of entrepreneurial leisure.
Marie Lorenz is an experimental navigator and alternative tour guide eschewing the economies dictated by adherence to Greenwich Mean Time. Her work betrays an interest in piracy, beat aimlessness, slow conveyance and theatrical anarchy, conjured as a resistant force against an alienating culture. In her Beaver Lodge project, she advances the industrious engineering of the beaver: in this outsider hideaway, she postulates a reversal of nihilistic vogue, where mankind will inhabit forms appropriated from nature.
Matthew Lusk clusters together a tent annex; temporary living quarters that draw form from the darker reaches of minimalist sculptural constructions. He inserts uneasiness into the crevasses of this material investigation, catalyzing surprising conceptual synapses. His campground of artifacts and invisible specters has been mysteriously abandoned by the inhabitants: evidence of conditions to be avoided.
Charles Goldman will cobble together salvaged parts to form hive-like structures that hover between organic and synthetic architectural form; appearing like a snaggletooth geodesic building practice. The sculpture seems to speak about architectonic systems that begin unpredictably, but then find an ordering procedure for infinite expandability, conforming organically to conditions of the site.
Michael Cataldi, sometime contributor to the Center for Urban Pedagogy, typically rearranges the scraps deposited in the interstices of cityspace, to build a playful model shelter. He gathers materials discarded in urban areas into a pavilion: a private gathering zone for public assembly. If Louis Kahn famously asked what a brick 'wants to be' to imply the sensitive relationship of surface and structure to the scale of the individual, perhaps Cataldi asks this considerate question of any piece of cast-off rubbish that he finds in abundance: Through found detritus, he envisions possibilities for constructing room-like shanty-spaces to inhabit as a dreamy respite. To a poet/scavenger, maybe an oddly shaped piece of flotsam 'wants' to seek the humble grandeur of participating in the sheltering of an individual. It is a mode of reuse applied towards one's attempt to endure the degradation of a wastefully unstoppable machine. At Art Omi, Cataldi's cave-like refuge is embedded into the land as if returning dwellers to their 'first architecture'.
-MG