NYAB Event - Janelle Iglesias "Cartwheel Galaxy"

Janelle Iglesias "Cartwheel Galaxy"

Larissa Goldston Gallery

This event has ended.

Larissa Goldston Gallery presents Cartwheel Galaxy, the gallery’s first solo exhibition of work by Janelle Iglesias. This will be the last exhibition in this space.

The exhibition will feature two large-scale sculptures that react to the imminent demolition of the 551 building and the perpetual destruction and creation of celestial bodies. The titular sculpture, Cartwheel Galaxy, is named after a lenticular galaxy in the Sculptor Constellation whose signature ring is comprised of supernovas and black holes. The sculpture, composed primarily of a collection of ladders collected from the streets of NYC, playfully celebrates the “poetics of everyday objects.”

Honoring the artist studios that have long been a part of the building’s unique history, Like Spinning Plates is an installation inspired also by the Constellation originally named l’Atelier du Sculpteur—the Sculptor’s Studio—by Abbé Nicolas Louis de Lacaille in 1756. Each of the four main stars in its asterism is mimicked by a cluster of light bulbs within the installation. A display of disparate objects are suspended and connected with tent poles, umbrella parts, metal beach chair frames and magnets. While meticulously planned, the installations are at the same time heavily improvised on site, providing a sense of intimacy, serendipity, balance and chaos.

Fascinated with informal and animal architecture, especially that of Bowerbirds, Iglesias meticulously collects and curates displaced and discarded items, including natural specimens, and materials sculpted by the elements and pairs them with discarded objects of human manufacture—a rotating record is juxtaposed against a charred stump with its concentric growth rings exposed. The accumulation of these aesthetic and formal relationships challenges the viewer to examine not only their relationship within urban and natural environments, but to question and explore greater ideas of connectivity within the universe.