Alice Channer “Half-life”
Lisa Cooley Fine Art
This event has ended.
Lisa Cooley presents Half-life, Alice Channer’s second solo exhibition with the gallery. In Half-life, fast and slow, object and subject, ancient and contemporary, horizontal and vertical, vertebrate and invertebrate both coalesce and separate to form a new, more singular body of work, including floor sculptures and framed digital prints on crepe de chine silk.
Alice Channer’s work proposes alternative physical states and kinds of embodiment. All of the works in the exhibition appear to be solid, but are made of unstable matter and parts that remain separate from each other; they have and could still pass through radical changes in state. Such extreme changes in state: in scale, time, materials, geology, economy, biology, politics and society are characteristic of our time. Living amidst these changes in state, and being both able and unable to adapt to them, are fundamental to what it means to be human in the Twenty First Century. Half-life articulates what this experience might feel like.
The artist has metaphorically and visually subjected silk, aluminum, ceramic, and steel to radical alterations, s t r e t c h i n g an object or material so that it blurs, distorts, or changes scale. Here, images of molten lava s t r e t c h beyond the height of the gallery ceiling, condense into h o r i z o n t a l slices, then flatten onto the gallery walls. Human bones awkwardly curve and s t r e t c h to the proportions of prehistoric animals. Marble rocks assume the form of bubbles and float up from the floor. Wet, heavy clay packs into long, pleated slabs, behaving as a flat, sheeted industrial material. These processes suggest radical and not entirely frictionless changes—between solid and liquid, animate and inanimate, subject and object, h o r i z o n t a l and vertical, gravitational and anti-gravitational, opening up an in-between place, a Half-life, a movement between and across various states of matter.
Several sculptures consist primarily of flat layers placed h o r i z o n t a l l y to each other, suggesting different changes in state - birth, sleeping, growth, molting, death. If they were bodies, these sculptures might be shells, empty and hollow, manufactured by both humans and non-humans from heavy clay, cold metal, loose fabric, and solid stone. They are object as much as subject, dis-embodied as much as embodied. As objects/subjects they half-inhabit strangely and subtly altered in-between physical states. They are h o r i z o n t a l, flat, shell-like, s t r e t c h e d, pleated, curved, stuttering, expanding, and contracting. These weird qualities awkwardly and elegantly suggest mutations and adaptations, particular and alternative other ways of being.
Alice Channer lives and works in London. Solo exhibitions include Synthetic Fibres at the Approach, London, United Kingdom (2014); Soft Shell at Kunstverein Freiburg, Germany (2013); Invertebrates at Hepworth Wakefield, West Yorkshire, United Kingdom (2013); Cold Blood at Lisa Cooley, New York (2012); Out Of Body at South London Gallery, London, United Kingdom (2012); Body Conscious (2011) and Worn-work (2009) at The Approach, London, United Kingdom; and Inhale, Exhale (2010) at the Mackintosh Gallery, Glasgow School of Art, as part of the Glasgow International, Glasgow, United Kingdom. She has participated in numerous group exhibitions, including at Fridericianum, Kassel, Germany; Kestnergesellschaft, Hanover, Germany; Künstlerhaus Halle für Kunst & Medien, Graz, Austria; Whitechapel Gallery, London, United Kingdom; Raven Row, London, United Kingdom; Tate Britain, London, United Kingdom; Stuart Shave Modern Art, London, United Kingdom; Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York; Lisson, London, United Kingdom; Hayward Gallery Touring, United Kingdom. Channer completed a BA in Fine Art at Goldsmiths College, and an MA in Sculpture at the Royal College of Art, both in London, United Kingdom. Her work is included in the Arts Council Collection, the Tate Permanent Collection, and the Zabludowicz Collection. Channer participated in the 55th Venice Biennale International Art Exhibition, Il Palazzo Enciclopedico / The Encyclopedic Palace. Channer has a solo exhibition, R o c k f a l l, on view at the Aspen Art Museum until May 31, 2015. The exhibition will then travel in July to City Hall Park, New York, for an exhibition organized by the Public Art Fund.
Media
Schedule
from May 10, 2015 to June 21, 2015
Opening Reception on 2015-05-10 from 18:00 to 20:00