Art News:
Wonder, the Impossible and the Everyday
Sunday, November 1, 6:15 pm
Mary-Jane Rubenstein will present a lecture related to her 2009 publication, Strange Wonder: The Closure of Metaphysics and the Opening of Awe (Columbia University Press). This book describes wonder as a response to the sudden strangeness of the everyday, and shows that while Western philosophy claims to be founded upon this pathos, it also does all it can to eradicate it for the sake of certainty and calculability. Insofar as wonder attunes itself to what seems unthinkable, even impossible, Rubenstein ultimately suggests that remaining with its indeterminacy might open thinking, creative expression, and the political onto a new terrain. Rubenstein teaches philosophy of religion at Wesleyan University, where she is Assistant Professor of Religion and of Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. This event was organized by the artist Ian Rosen.
2009 Rema Hort Mann Foundation Visual Art Grants
Matt Sheridan Smith and Alex Fleming are among the 2009 winners of the Rema Hort Mann Foundation Visual Art Grants.
2009 Seattle Art Museum's Betty Bowen Award
Lisa Cooley is pleased to present a solo presentation of work by Erin Shirreff at Frame, a new section for young galleries at the Frieze Art Fair, which takes place in Regent’s Park, London, from October 15 through 19. The gallery will be at stand R13.
Erin Shirreff will present 8 large-scale photographs from a group of works called Knives. The images suggest documentation of archeological remains but the objects they present do not belong to traceable history or reveal details of their provenance. Rather, as hand-modeled sculpture presented in two dimensions, the work speaks of its own making and materiality.
The objects are made from wax-based non-drying clay so their surfaces appear skin-like and supple, contrasting with the hard-edged threat of the tools they vaguely echo. Centered, cross-lit, and presented greatly enlarged in black-and-white (the artist’s fingerprints are sometimes visible), they are factual renderings of fictional things.
The series relate to minimalist taxonomies (e.g., Bernd and Hilla Becher’s), Walker Evans’s portraits of tools, and in their formal composition, to Robert Mapplethorpe’s abstract and sexualized depictions of bodies and flowers. Shirreff’s photographs thus straddle, perhaps uneasily, the thin line between representation and abstraction: ambiguously defined objects are clearly itemized as their mottled surfaces are transformed into varying tones of light and dark.
Shirreff never exhibits the objects themselves. Their portraits are left to speak for them, but in their formality silences remain. The generalities are there—these are base, elementary shapes—but in the end they are hauntingly blank. This affect of blankness and what it sets in motion, something that recurs throughout Shirreff’s practice, serves to highlight the process that we each engage in when we create meaning day to day.
Erin has said, “[I started] to think in the most general terms about how we generate meaning […], how we anthropomorphize things or rely on familiar metaphors, about the simple circuitous mechanics of how we project meaning onto what’s around us as a way to understand it and ourselves. […] I’m curious about moments when something ordinary defies naming.”
Erin Shirreff lives and works in New York City. She was born in Kelowna, British Columbia and received her MFA from Yale University. Recent exhibitions include Some Thing Else, curated by Simone Subal, at Peter Blum, and Broken Thorn Sweet Blackberry, curated by Sima Familant at Sikkema Jenkins & Co, both in New York. Lisa Cooley will present her solo debut in October 2009 and in 2010, she will exhibit new work with Barbara Kasten and Anthony Pearson at Shane Cambell Gallery in Chicago.
For more information, please contact the gallery at +1 212-680-0564 or via email at frontdesk@lisa-cooley.com.20
Josh Faught has been awarded the 2009 Betty Bowen Award from the Seattle Art Museum. In addition to the award, he will have a year-long exhibition at the museum.
More information on both awards can be found here.
Lisa Cooley
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34 Orchard Street
New York, New York 10002
frontdesk@lisa-cooley.com
www.lisa-cooley.com
p. +1 212-680-0564
f. +1 212-680-0565
Directions: Orchard between Hester and Canal
Subway: F at East Broadway
Hours: Wed-Sun, Noon – 6
