NYAB Event - Anne Chu “Rubric for the Eye”

Anne Chu “Rubric for the Eye”

Tracy Williams Ltd.

This event has ended.

See an-wide, world-long, air-high
See water-deep and earth-round.
Then let the eye look whole-impossible,
Look wider, longer, higher, deeper, rounder.
Let the thought sharpen as the eye dulls.
Let the thought see let moon undazzle sun
Sun of world, moon of word,
Eye-spilling live of eye, undeath of mind-sight-
Moon-clearly, emptily, full grail aspeak.
- Laura Riding Jackson

Tracy Williams, Ltd. presents Anne Chu’s Rubric for the Eye, in her first solo exhibition with the gallery. Following her recent major exhibition, Animula Vagula Blandula at the Museum Haus Lange in Krefeld, Germany in 2012-13, this presentation is an ambitious new body of work that vies with notions of stasis and change, phenomenology and transformation, as well as the past and present. Titled after the coda of a poem by the American poet Laura Riding Jackson, Chu’s exhibition confronts material and form in a manner that is entirely her own. As the elegy suggests, she challenges viewers to open their eyes- seek the unknown and jump in.

Chu has constructed large mobiles-a completely new format for the artist-along with eight framed works on paper. Hanging from the ceiling at various levels, abstract forms, sculpted figures, and animals take flight. Each element can be examined from various perspectives and angles, arousing a combined sense of rotation, oscillation, and also at times complete immobility. Using porcelain, wood, metal, and leatherin unexpected ways, Chu has transformed these materials. This rendition is an evolution from past to present. There is a mystery within her process of creating this biomorphic hybridity of work, which ultimately unveils the beginning of the new.

Chu’s oeuvre has been embedded with ancient and historical influences, including Tang dynasty funerary figures and Austrian marionettes. By channeling spirits of cultures past, her work has withstood a presence that transcends the ages. Chu incorporates similar subjects for this exhibition, and is continuing to honor and preserve these legacies and relics by re-imaging her methods.

The central idea in this work lives in Chu’s interest in how familiar materials can morph and evolve from one thing into another. The reconstruction of materials and manipulation of traditional techniques is a transformative act that mediates between subject and object, abstraction and figuration, color and form. The investigation resides in the reconfiguration of the object’s material iconography - “Look wider, longer, higher, deeper, rounder.”

Anne Chu lives and works in New York. She received her BFA from the Philadelphia College of Art, followed by her MFA from Columbia University. Chu has held several notable solo and group exhibitions at the following galleries and institutions worldwide: Museum Haus Lange in Krefeld, Germany (2013); The Brooklyn Museum, New York (2011); Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, PA (2010 and 2008); Monica De Cardenas, Zuoz Switzerland (2010), Milan, Italy (2007); 303 Gallery, New York, NY (2008); Donald Young Gallery, Chicago, IL (2009);Gladstone Gallery, New York, NY (2007); Aspen Art Museum, Colorado (2007); Victoria Miro Gallery, London, UK (2006); Miami Museum of Contemporary Art, Florida (2005); Matrix Gallery, University of California at Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley, CA (2000); Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indiana (2000); among many others. Chu is a 2010 John and Simon Memorial Guggenheim Fellow and has been the recipient of many prominent awards and grants including, Alpert/Ucross Residency Prize (2009); Penny McCall Award, New York and Anonymous Was a Woman Foundation, New York (2001); Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant, New York (1999); Louis Comfort Tiffany Biennial Competition, New York (1997); Dieu Donné Papermill Inc, New York (1994); and others.