Emily Roysdon "Positions"
Art in General
This event has ended.
Throughout her practice, Emily Roysdon’s multidisciplinary approach to art making has incorporated photography, printmaking, performance, and an extensive history of collaboration. For her first solo exhibition in New York, Positions brings together a body of work that culminates around a dialectic consideration of language, choreography, and political representation.
In the artist’s words, “To take a position is both choreographic and discursive.“ This, alongside a consideration of the formal and public square, is the frame for Roysdon’s recent projects. Positions presents a series of three works that are defined by a short-term and improvisational working method with a focus on developing and articulating a vocabulary of movement while applying gesture to shifting concepts of site. Created specifically for her exhibition at Art in General, Roysdon produced three large silkscreened rectangular panels that lean—using the room as armature and exploring the weight of an image. Positions, for which the exhibition is titled, explores the intersection between figure and ground, the logic of the grid, and the repetition and accumulation of ungrounded figures.
Also included in the exhibition is Sense and Sense (2010), a site-specific project that the artist produced in Sergels Torg, a public square in Stockholm, Sweden. Sergels Torg is many things to the city—most notably, the site for all planned political protests and the de facto image of the city; its black and white triangular pattern coming to symbolize the city and the idea of the city. Approaching the site itself, Roysdon conceived of the square as both a panopticon and an abstraction, provoking questions about planned use and the representation of ‘free movement’. Subsequently, Roysdon collaborated with performance artist MPA to produce a site-specific performance from which she developed a photographic installation and a video diptych.
Building upon this original engagement, If I Don’t Move Can You Hear Me? is a series of square panels silkscreened with images depicting Roysdon’s movement vocabulary as well as deconstructed and assertive lines layered on geometric photographs of the Berkeley Art Museum. Each panel rests at 45 degrees along a long horizontal shelf, inserting a sense of movement, not only in the lines and figures themselves, but also in the weight of their form.
Roysdon collaborated with Stockholm design collective Studio SM to create a trio of posters documenting the artist’s working material and process. The third poster in the series, produced especially for this exhibition, will be distributed to visitors.
[Image: Emily Roysdon with MPA “untitled” from "Sense and Sense" 2010 digital chromogenic print 19 × 17 in.]
Media
Schedule
from March 25, 2011 to May 28, 2011
Opening Reception on 2011-03-25 from 18:00 to 20:00