Stéphane Calais "Flowers for America"
ZieherSmith
This event has ended.
Composites both practical and conceptual are at the center of the Stéphane Calais’s process in his second exhibition with ZieherSmith. The installation features paintings and sculpture as well as the artist’s own multifaceted approach to drawing. Stéphane Calais was a finalist for the 2008 Marcel Duchamp prize and has exhibited widely at an international list of galleries and museums.
In Pleiades, Calais morphs by superimposition eight watercolor drawings of “famous” men from three centuries into a sequence of sixteen pulsing, frenetic silkscreen portraits. Hanging in a formidable grid, their antique stateliness is, in fact, a mockery of identity and power, each sitter’s visage illegible; crumpled into seven others like last week’s news. These apparitions also question traditions in portraiture drawn by hand, considered by some today as almost quaint.
In a series of sculptures Calais calls Ornaments, crimes and delights, macramé plant hangers filled with basketballs, feathers and plastic leaves hang from the ceiling like storks delivering Calais’s creative spawn. These collages of found and repurposed materials embrace lowly, crafty supplies and employ a symbolic, embroidered veil for the toy at the center of a multi-billion dollar industry. Undaunted by the decorative, Calais also approaches the ornamental with exuberant floral still lifes executed in tondi form and collectively titled Flowers for America.
Media
Schedule
from October 08, 2009 to November 07, 2009
Opening Reception on 2009-10-08 from 18:00 to 20:00