Ward Shelley "Who Invented the Avant Garde/The Sleeper Experiment"
Pierogi
This event has ended.
In his second exhibition of painted timeline drawings at Pierogi, Ward Shelley has expanded his concerns from the lives and careers of individual artists (as in Re-materializing Art, 2006), to mapping the role of art as a shaping force in the world in Who Invented the Avant Garde – and other half-truths.
Shelley's timeline pieces are expansive graphic depictions of complex relationships between events and people over time, linked by a subject or idea. For example, in The Beats he tracks the lives, loves, and artistic output of the primary Beat Poets and their muses, using highway-like lines to trace their travels and travails.
Driven by their content, Shelley's drawings are rich in factual detail, yet often present highly subjective points of view. The unorthodox presentation, in turns borrowing from graphical conventions and improvising with an eccentric and personal hand drawn style is, in a sense, the speaker's voice, giving the stories their color and spin.
The exhibition continues in the back gallery with Shelley's performance installation The Sleeper Experiment. From April 16 to April 30, during regular (daytime) gallery hours, the artist will sleep in the gallery as he has in the past, this time inside a cabinet made for the purpose. He will work during the night on drawings based on information provided by visitors. The visitors, virtual or actual, are invited to contribute random input (in the form of words, short phrases, or images) that will become the basis for concept maps. This input will be read to the artist by a speaking computer program during his sleeping hours. In the evening he will rise and begin drawing, leaving the results on view for the following day.
Media
Schedule
from April 17, 2009 to May 17, 2009