NYAB Event - Charles Harlan “Flood”

Charles Harlan “Flood”

Pioneer Works

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Pioneer Works presents Flood, a solo-exhibition by Brooklyn-based artist Charles Harlan. Exploring relationships between scale and context, artwork and institution, Harlan will transform everyday industrial objects – such as bricks, metal fencing, and asphalt shingles – into monumental, minimalist forms created specifically for the expansive gallery space. The exhibition is curated by Pioneer Works Curator/Editor, David Everitt Howe.

In Flood, three monumental works commissioned by Pioneer Works will occupy the art center’s vast, multi-floor space. Water (2016) is a ten-foot wide by ten-foot high walled-off, square, masonry structure containing a basin filled with water, nodding to the Red Hook waterfront just blocks away. Its pool will only directly be visible from upper floors, though perceptually its refraction of sunlight will have an outsize presence. Behind the installation, a six-foot-wide chain link fence, Fence (2016), drapes thirty-three feet from the rafters and snakes along the floor, a giant, trailing scrim and surface-cum-translucent object. Shingles (2016) cheekily riffs off Carl Andre’s bronze floor works, using instead asphalt roofing tile. Stretching across several rooms on the ground floor, the tiles act as a pathway of sorts, guiding viewers through the former industrial space to engage with the imposing structures in the main gallery.

Throughout his practice, Harlan (b. 1984, Smyrna, GA) re-contextualizes industrial and suburban materials by situating them within gallery and public contexts. In the process, these as-is, everyday items are given newfound aesthetic value, undermining – in the vein of the Readymade – given conventions of what constitutes a work of art and its institutionalization.

Harlan received his BS from New York University in 2006. Forthcoming exhibitions include Atlanta Contemporary, Carl Kostyál, London, and Rodolphe Janssen, Brussels. Recent solo exhibitions include Hamlet’s Mill, Ribordy Contemporary, Geneva, Switzerland (2015); Ishtar, Venus Over Manhattan, New York, NY (2014); The Gate, Karma, New York, NY (2013), andCave, JTT, New York, NY (2013). Select group exhibitions include Object Painting – Painting Object, Jonathan Viner, London (2015); Over & Under, Sikkema Jenkins & Co, New York, NY (2015); Judo, organized by Zak Kitnick, Clifton Benevento, New York, NY (2015); The Unwinding, Cookie Butcher, Antwerp, Belgium (2014); To do as one would,David Zwirner, New York, NY (2014); do it (outside), curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist, Socrates Sculpture Park, Long Island City, NY (2013); and The Medicine Bag, Maccarone, New York, NY (2011). His work has been featured in The New Yorker, The New York Times, ArtReview, Kaleidoscope, and Mousse, with an interview by Carol Bove forthcoming in Flash Art.