NYAB Event - Meredyth Sparks "Extraction"

This event has ended.
At Elizabeth Dee
Media: Other, Sculpture, Installation

Using the documentary photographs of her previous collages as a foundation, pieces that often incorporated images of musical and political figures from the 1970s and 1980s, Sparks introduces a new series of works on paper and stretched canvases in which the figure has largely disappeared. In the absence of these icons, extracted fragments and sections of collage material are imbued with a new and evocative signification, alongside the scanned aluminum foil and piles of glitter that have become Sparks’ signature gesture. Reconfigured, the compositions function as residual imprints upon which Sparks has placed post-it notes, woodcuts and stitched fabric. The resulting collages and paintings, for which she has coined the neologism extractions, intimate the historical avant-garde and the gender-based innovations of the Pattern and Decoration movement, among others.

In several works, the figure re-enters through abstract, fabric forms, including both cut-out templates and cut-away pieces taken from clothing patterns. One colored acetate sculpture gathers all the components needed to make an entire outfit of clothing, while other fabric patterns include vinyl stencils derived from a Kasimir Malevich painting that Sparks has previously integrated into her collages and wall interventions. A life-size wall-piece presents an image of two women applying this vinyl pattern for Sparks’ recent exhibition in Cologne (Projects in Art and Theory, 2009), providing another reminder of the labor-based preoccupations that function as a primary theme throughout the exhibition.

[Image: Meredyth Sparks "Extraction" (2009) Digital scan, aluminum foil, glitter 15.75 x 12.75 in. Courtesy of Elizabeth Dee Gallery, New York]

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