“USES” Exhibition
Ortega y Gasset Projects @ The Old American Can Factory
[Image: Mark Dion "Oceanomania" (2011) 2-color photopolymer etching on magnami pescia paper 13 x 16 in. Courtesy of the artist and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York]
This event has ended.
Curated by Fritz Horstman
Ortega y Gasset Projects presents in its main gallery Uses, a group exhibition curated by Fritz Horstman featuring work by Mark Dion, Todd Freeman, Richard Klein, Naomi Safran-Hon, and Zoe Sheehan Saldaña. Concurrently in the vestibule gallery, Kirsten Hassenfeld’s Star Upon Star will be on view.
Drawing on George Kubler’s seminal 1962 book The Shape of Time (Yale University Press), we observe that merely useful things disappear more completely into history than pleasurable things. There are not many shovels or shoes still in existence from the Middle Ages because they wore out and were thrown away, useful though they once had been. From the same time period there are countless paintings, held onto and preserved because they were elevated to the realm of art – certainly not because their owners anticipated some future practical use. The group of work brought together in Uses plies the drift between objects that are made to simply be pleasurable to behold, and objects that are beautiful because they are useful. Everything in this exhibition was made with the intention of being art, but with at least one eye looking back across the spectrum of usefulness towards the mundane tools that will fade into history.
In Mark Dion’s print Oceanomania we see the tools and trophies of an ocean voyage. Barrels and spears are displayed beside taxadermed fish and paintings of boats. The cabinet Dion depicts is filled with objects that have been taken out of use so that they can be preserved and displayed. While the print exists as art, the cabinet and its contents are a waystation between tool and art.
A net is a system of lines woven in a repeating rhythm. In Todd Freeman’s drawings, the same features that make a net functional make it visually beautiful. His nets seem to be on display rather than in use, as if to question whether they should be allowed back into use or preserved in their elevated state as art objects.
Richard Klein combines found salt dishes and glass ashtrays in Salt and Cigarettes. The sparkling cut and molded glass on which bygone logos are emblazoned seem to be sliding off or grabbing the edge of the low table on which they are set. The sculpture forms a sort of hand-sized disused landscape, on which we look down from above.
In Fragment: Pattern in 2 Parts Naomi Safran-Hon has pushed concrete through a decorative fabric pattern, and then applied gray spray paint through the same pattern. It is an acknowledgement of the usefulness of decoration, and the beauty of concrete, a material mostly known for its utility.
Zoe Sheehan Saldaña makes seemingly simple everyday factory-made objects by hand. Working with chemist Dr. Glen Kowach, she made Strike Anywhere, an edition of 250 strike-anywhere matches. They are the same size and material as a conventional match, but made by hand by the artist. If they are ever put to use they will be destroyed. Their status as art objects denies their potential as useful objects.
Media
Schedule
from February 27, 2016 to April 03, 2016
Opening Reception on 2016-02-27 from 18:00 to 21:00