Adam Frelin and Rena Leinberger “From Within the Flesh of the World”

Radiator Gallery

poster for Adam Frelin and Rena Leinberger “From Within the Flesh of the World”

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Radiator Gallery announces an exhibition of recent photographs, sculptures, and videos by Adam Frelin and Rena Leinberger. By re-creating, displacing, and transforming seemingly familiar images, objects, sites, and actions, the artists construct distinctive narratives as well as explore the role of the mediums. With their formal qualities, these works subvert art historical conventions as well as cultural and societal expectations. The works conflate fact and fiction, past and present, and the natural and man-made environment. The title of the exhibition, From Within the Flesh of the World, is taken from Victor Burgin’s essay, “Monument and Melancholia” (2008).

Installed on a diagonal in the back of the main gallery is Frelin’s outdoor sculpture Drifter, a tapered 14-foot long unsealed wood cylinder coated with layers of dirt at the bottom. Having first been situated in a cemetery, the sculpture – symbolic of a safety coffin’s cylinder from the 18th century – has absorbed its surrounding environment. It bridges the uncanny divide between the living and deceased as well as reality and fiction.

Kodamazothgolemnkiski consists of a series of close up photographs of anthropomorphic, totemic sculptures of blackened gum that Frelin scraped off the sidewalks of New York. At a distance, these objects resemble primitive prehistoric figures. The video Firefall is a re-creation of an epic event that took place in Yosemite National Park until the 1960s, where hot embers were shoveled over a cliff, resembling a vivid red waterfall.

Leinberger focuses on the intrigue of the spectacle in relation to constructed and demolished environments in her work. Her Zero Panorama series was inspired by an image she found while searching for historical explosions on the Internet – one of naval officers and one of the wives cutting into a cake to celebrate a nuclear testing site – which was deemed obscene by The Washington Post. Leinberger’s black and white photographs are of re-creations of iconic images, such as the historical explosions of Nagasaki and the Challenger, but in cake frosting. The artist explores the “seduction of the spectacle” of both of the explosion and frosting as well as the dichotomy between the rational and absurd.

In Utopias, Unmoored, Leinberger creates a series of photographs and videos of small-scale islands of urban settings constructed out of unstable and inexpensive materials – foam, colored paper, wood pieces – in the water. Leinberger obscures referential details of location. She examines the relationship between architecture, landscape, and societal interventions as well as failure theory in building materials.

Media

Schedule

from October 25, 2014 to December 13, 2014

Opening Reception on 2014-10-25 from 18:00 to 21:00

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