Lea Cetera “Sprawl”
Art in General
[Image: Lea Cetera in collaboration with Ivy Haldeman "Abject Affection" (video still), 2014. Courtesy the artists.]
This event has ended.
Art in General is pleased to present Sprawl, a New Commission with Lea Cetera in the Storefront Project Space.
In this newly created installation, Cetera draws inspiration from the consumer language of the storefront window, employing its specific layers of flattened perspective produced by glass-walled architecture, and tight proximity of space that is both public and private. As with her broader artistic practice that often updates the concerns of 1960s Minimalism, Cetera here engages with the phenomenological aspects of navigating the built environment that influence our psychological and emotional states. This project includes performance, live-feed and prerecorded video, and a series of new sculptures that recall the window grates and security fences that are prominent features of the urban landscape. Her objects reference these peripheral, precautionary elements found in New York City in their formal relationship to the human body’s scale and shape, as well as their functionality in guiding or blocking the body’s capacity to grasp, reach, or climb. Addressing the condition of simultaneous visibility and invisibility that comes with city dwelling, Sprawl draws the street viewer and passerby into a fourth, projected space that implicates them in the acts of viewing and being viewed as participants in the constructed and surveilled environment. For the artist, these gestures serve as metaphors for aggression, control, and self-preservation, as well as comfort, safety, and order—all omnipresent concerns of contemporary urban life.
Emerging from a collaborative background in theater and filmmaking, Cetera works in video, sculpture, and performance to produce temporal installations that examine the space between object and body, public and private, virtual and real. Utilizing techniques culled from the moving image, stage design, and puppetry, her work investigates constructed identities, the mediation of contemporary technology, the alienation of the human body, and the aura of fetishized objects.
Lea Cetera has performed and exhibited work in the United States and abroad at venues including The Jewish Museum, New York (2014); Disjecta Contemporary Art Center, Portland (2014); SculptureCenter, Long Island City (2013); High Desert Test Sites, Joshua Tree (2012); New Wight Biennial, Los Angeles (2012); Anthology Film Archives, New York (2010); and PortugalArte Biennial, Lisbon (2010). Cetera holds an MFA from Columbia University (2012) and a BFA from the Cooper Union School of Art (2005). She lives and works in New York City.
Media
Schedule
from January 22, 2015 to February 21, 2015
Closing reception: Saturday, February 21, 5–6pm. Performances: Thursday, January 22, 6–8pm; Saturday, February 21, 5–6pm.
Opening Reception on 2015-01-22 from 18:00 to 20:00