"Soft Machines" Exhibition
The Pace Gallery (545 W 22nd St)
This event has ended.
A new Double Vampire sculpture from 2011 by Sterling Ruby, whose diverse practice confronts contemporary isolation and the social structures that create it, will also be on view. Ruby will be the subject of a solo exhibition at The Pace Gallery, Beijing this fall. Other highlights include Lovett/Codagnone’s installation “Give me the Night”, 2011—a disco ball looming over steel barricades—referencing seventies-era repression of sexual freedom and bodily empowerment, and continuing the duo’s ongoing investigations of power relations and public/private dichotomies.
Tim Hawkinson’s bodily impression is inverted and inflated in his life-sized, silicone skin “Balloon Self-Portrait #4”, 1996. Daisy Chain, 1992, by Kiki Smith, a leading figure among artists investigating the physical, social, and spiritual aspects of human nature, will also be on view. Versions of the disembodied head and links of steel on view in “Soft Machines” have been included in major museum exhibitions including Kiki Smith: A Gathering, 1980–2005 (traveled to San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 2005–7). In addition, Kathryn Garcia will explore the psychoanalytic idea of ‘le corps morcele’ (“the body in pieces”) in a mixed-media installation from2011.
Other featured works include Beijing-based artist Ma Qiusha’s gripping psychological portrait “No.4 Pingyuanli” to “No.4 Tianqiaobeili”, a video performance of the artist holding a razor blade to her tongue as she recounts short narratives about her life as a young artist, exploring artists’ conflict with societal, cultural, and familial pressures of achieving success; new work by Adam Pendleton from his System of Display and Black Dada series, playing with visual codes embedded in language; and Anthony Keith Giannini’s Gather then Mourn, 2011, which questions the role of media generated imagery in creating a contemporary grand narrative.
Paul Pfeiffer’s 2004 video, “Desiderata”, uses the TV show The Price Is Right as a departure to examine the role mass media plays in shaping human conscious and highlighting society’s compulsion for money and materiality.
British performance artist Stuart Brisley’s installation “The Collection of Ordure”, 2002, will confront pollution, excrement, excess and consumption in relation to the body. Liz Magic Laser & Anna Ostoya will debut Imprint (photographs), an ongoing project that began in 2009, which documents stains and the blood-like imprints of body parts—feet, ears, fingertips, etc.—in commercial spaces throughout New York City. Notions of artistic process, leisure pursuits and neurotic behaviors are merged to re-articulate consumer conduct. Holton Rower’s "6ac6g", 2011, an organic evolution of the artist’s experiments with incremental paint-pouring, referencing the effect of hallucinogenics in distorting perception and function of mind and body, will also be on view.
Media
Schedule
from July 14, 2011 to August 26, 2011
Opening Reception on 2011-07-13 from 18:00 to 21:00
Kate Gilmore will debut a new performance, entitled "Through the Claw", 2011