“The Look of Things” Exhibition
SOLOWAY
[Image: Oliver Strand "Three Handmade Spoons"]
This event has ended.
Soloway presents an exhibition of works selected by Nancy Shaver titled The Look Of Things.* Her razor-sharp eye has been at work since her photographs of ordinary objects and scavenging quests with Walker Evans in the 1970s. Shaver’s “heightened visual understanding” and “operations of selection and reframing” are at work in this collection of exceptional artists and objects.** The hierarchy-bending connections between Oliver Strand’s three handmade spoons and Beka Goedde’s upright backyard totems are a hallmark of Shaver’s. These diverse works by artists of different generations and sensibilities all have an un-namable magnetism, much like the collection assembled in Shaver’s store, Henry, located in Hudson, New York.
The Group, 2015, is a collaborative work by Nancy Shaver and Emi Winter. Shaver’s sculptures, in which fabrics play a primary role, are poised on top of Winter’s contribution, a rug made by weavers in a village outside of the city of Oaxaca. As Richard Klein, the exhibitions director of the Aldrich Museum explains: Shaver “selects fabrics not just for the abstract patterning and color, but also for their encoded sociological meaning. By wrapping fabric around wooden blocks and assembling the blocks into three-dimensional objects, she is declaring them to be more a part of the world of art—not craft—a position where both making and philosophical inquiry are on an equal footing.***
“Jared Buckhiester begins with a found photograph, whose outlines he transfers to a copper plate [resulting in] an apparent maelstrom of fragmented body parts in a storm of black lines, white space and violet stains….Watercolor bathing suits and snippets of Conan the Barbarian comics are coated with methylcellulose and affixed to still-wet paper in a second pass, along with delicate pools of flushed and bloody watercolor.”****
Kenji Fujita makes work out of ordinary materials such as cardboard, aluminum foil, felt, wood, fabric, paper and paint. With these materials, he creates commonplace geometries of shape and form that are then cut, torn and glued into unexpected amalgams of order and disorder.
Beka Goedde’s tall, totem-like figures are installed in the space behind the gallery. Goedde is concerned with the way all things living and inert are in a constant state of motion. These sculptures will inevitably become transformed by the elements through a slow and invisible process.
Sara Magenheimer’s practice spans sculpture, collage, installation, video, sound, and performance. She engages the way language performs as physical material; vibrating the air as sound, moving on a screen as text or on a page as graphic image.
Joyce Robins’ sculpture is made of clay, glaze and paint. She is investigating the areas between volumetric sculpture and flat painting using low-relief. Robins has been discovering richer and more sensual ways to manipulate color and space using as little as possible to make so much—a rule that animates woman’s arts through history.
Media
Schedule
from September 13, 2015 to October 18, 2015
Screening by Sara Magenheimer on October 18 at 8:00 p.m.
Opening Reception on 2015-09-13 from 18:00 to 20:00