Friday, February 26, 2010

White Flag Projects: Saturday, 27 February 2010

Newtonland: Orbits, Ellipses and other Planes of Activity
Greg Bogin, Elizabeth Bryant, Anne Eastman, Ib Geertsen, Grabner/Killam, Jean Painleve, Jan Van Der Ploeg and Jonas Wood
Curated by Michelle Grabner

Free opening reception Saturday evening, February 27, 7–10 PM
On view through April 10, 2010

Fiscal exigencies have bestowed artists with promising new freedoms. No longer charged with the aim to develop tamped spoils for the voracious speculative collector, many artists are once again examining the formal dimensions of three-dimensional space.

The once reliable foundations of the world have proven to be faithless bubbles. In the studio, artists are not simply rediscovering Alexander Calder's mobiles anew, but are investigating the capriciousness of atmosphere and the loss of support (canvas, wall, pedestal, floor).

This suspended work is the inverse of recent accretion-based sculptural practices that engage in synthetic concepts of space. The works included in Newtonland actively invent non-static spatial relations, experiment with organizing structures, and choreograph movement. This experimentation is the physical opposite of accumulation and collection practices — many of which were aptly featured in the New Museum's exhibition Unmonumental: The Object in the 21st Century (2007), which was comprised of organizational gestures that strikingly paralleled the bundling of debt by banks. Contemporary mobile work does away with traditional supports, allowing gravity to becomes the final arbiter. In Newtonland a force of nature takes the reigns in compositional arrangement.

The artists included in Newtonland harness gravitational forces in various degrees. Greg Bogin's shaped canvas suggests orbital speed and rotation, while Elizabeth Bryant evokes natural phenomenon that is closer to home. In her photographic mobile, forms are cut free from their conventional pictorial landscape. Anne Eastman's stabiles negotiate geometries wrought in familiar materials, while Ib Geertsen and Jan Van Der Ploeg explore the abstract qualities of form and color when subjected to the merits of balance and harmony. Jonas Wood's drawings claim a debt to Calder's mobiles and stabiles while identifying parallel compositions in the structure of houseplants. Like Eastman's vernacular material references, Michelle Grabner and Brad Killam's large-scale suspended screen employs familiar aluminum stadium bleacher material with traditional silverpoint line drawing. Finally, a selection of Jean Painleve's early 20th century nature films document radical life forms that have evolved in the relative density of the sea.

White Flag Projects
4568 Manchester Avenue
St. Louis, MO 63110
*NEW WEB ADDRESS*
http://www.white-flag-projects.org

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