NYAB Event - Isidro Blasco “Above and Under L Train”

Isidro Blasco “Above and Under L Train”

Black & White Gallery / Project Space

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Black & White Gallery / Project Space presents ‘Above and Under L Train’ - a site-specific installation by Isidro Blasco.

Blasco’s new large-scale architectural environment is an impressive structure that merges conceptual and physical spaces, actively encouraging viewers to become adventurous participants. ‘Above and Under L-Train’ invites the audience to ponder the complexities of systems hidden beneath the surface. It strives to capture the disorienting appearance of integration of visceral forces that may not be easily perceivable and create an atmosphere of uncertainty.

Artist Statement

We use the subway every day and we don’t know how it works, how many parts are involved, how everything comes together to make it happen. I imagine it is a big mess—a lot of metal structure holding the dirt back in the shape of the tunnels, metal I-beams holding the ceiling, large slabs of concrete holding the walls. The seamlessness of it all seems purposely disorienting. Especially when I have only fragmented images: the dark tunnels, the illuminated platforms and stairs. In an effort to relate to these places, I’ve tried to introduce an emotional restraint/dynamism that doesn’t imply destruction so much as disorientation - the unsettlingly simultaneous expansion and compression of space that the urban dweller experiences. I’ve invited people to walk through this installation, to experience these semi-familiar spaces, noticing here what had changed too slowly and incrementally for them to notice in the real world.

Process

Isidro Blasco combines architecture, photography, and installation to explore physical and psychological terrains. Blasco uses digital images and building materials to create large- and small-scale architectural environments and three-dimensional reconstructions of neighborhoods, producing snapshots of cityscapes that play with perception. Beginning with a viewpoint of a building, or an interior or exterior space, Blasco takes photographs and pieces together images into photo-sculptures, reminiscent of Cubist collages with their multitudes of angles. Blasco’s slight distortions of perspective produce scenes that can appear both recognizable and unfamiliar. “I connect my experience as an outsider who walks the streets and interacts with the city with my more intimate feelings about closed and private spaces,” he says.

Isidro Blasco (b. 1962 in Madrid) lives and works in New York. He exhibits widely both at home and internationally. Recent solo museum exhibitions include Museu Metropolitano de Arte, MuMa. Curitiba, Brazil (2014), Aqui Huidizo, Comunidad de Madrid, Alcala 31. Madrid, Spain (2010), Center for Art and Design, The College of Saint Rose, Albany, NY (2007), Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, Spain (2004), Museo Patio Herreriano, Valladolid, Spain (2003), Museo de Arte y Diseño Contemporáneo, San José, Costa Rica (2000), Queens Museum of Art, Bulova Center, Queens, NY (1999) as well as ‘Tribute and Memory’ at the Centro Cultural Palacio La Moneda in Santiago de Chile, ‘Stretching the Truth’ at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, Sheboygan, WI, La Construcción del Paisaje Contemporáneo at the Centro de Arte y Naturaleza, Huesca, Spain, and ‘Substance and Light: Ten Sculptors Use Cameras’ at the Museum of Art, Munson-Williams Proctor Arts Institute, Utica, NY. He is a recipient of the prestigious Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in Visual Arts (2000). His work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art and Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, Baltimore Museum of Art, Chicago Institute of Contemporary Art, and several museums in his native Spain as well as in many private collections.