Norm Paris “Containerful”
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For this exhibition, Paris takes as his premise the overprotection of imagined artifacts. This archive of fictional forms consists of sculptures commemorating athletic figures, their gestures, and their ephemera. Containerful presents structures made to enclose this literal and figurative content during transport. The show’s title is defined as “the quantity that a container will hold.”
The fiction at the core of Paris’s practice concerns itself with the encasement of both personal and cultural memory. For the central work in the gallery, the artist envisions a sculpture of the 1980’s football player Earnest Byner only to build a crate around the implied monument. Conventional crating techniques serve as a starting point for a series of deviations and hyperbolic productions meant to safeguard fragile content.
The artist explores physical support systems as both a metaphorical construction and an opportunity for aesthetic expression. The abundance of joists and beams within the crate are meant to brace the absent form, but they also make it impossible to safely pack or unpack the hypothetical object. Load-bearing structures are overbuilt to the point of simultaneous beauty and mechanical failure. This is a fantasy burdened by gravity; here, even imagined forms have real weight.
Norm Paris was born in Cleveland, Ohio and lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. His work has been featured at The Jewish Museum, New York, NY, The Jewish Museum, San Francisco, CA, The Print Center, Philadelphia, Pa, the Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro, NC, and at the French art fair Drawing Now Paris /Le Salon Du Dessin Contemporain. His last solo show, The Wall Still Stands, was hosted at The Proposition Gallery in New York, where the artist is represented. Norm Paris is an Associate Professor at Rhode Island School of Design. He received his M.F.A. from the Yale School of Art and his B.F.A. from the Rhode Island School of Design.
Media
Schedule
from January 10, 2014 to February 16, 2014
Opening Reception on 2014-01-10 from 19:00 to 22:00