Robert and Shana ParkeHarrison "The Architect’s Brother"
Jack Shainman Gallery
This event has ended.
Jack Shainman Gallery presents The Architect’s Brother, a solo exhibition of work by Robert and Shana ParkeHarrison, comprising photographs from the series of the same name, alongside new sculpture. The Architect’s Brother, a series created between1993 and 2001, includes both RC prints on panel, hand painted and layered with encaustic, and photogravures. The George Eastman House organized a solo show of this body of work, which traveled to thirteen institutions between 2002 and 2007. This is the first time this body of work will be exhibited in depth in New York.
Images based on a concern for the environment - assuming such a monolithic entity - are often practical and illustrative. Sculptures that invest locally harvested materials with a human twist, for example, or photographs that juxtapose culture and nature, are necessary to remind us that the world is vulnerable to the changes we wring upon it. But these works are of limited effect. They only confirm what science tells us, and scientists freely admit they don’t know everything.
Artwork investigating nature and ecology that aims to transcend this dilemma must achieve the more difficult and nuanced task of proposing relationships larger than those we can imagine for ourselves. What if the environment is not what we think we see, but something altogether more complicated? Which leads us to the work of Robert and Shana ParkeHarrison.
The world constructed by the ParkeHarrisons is a multilayered place unified by a collision of elements that illuminate and obscure. The result is speculative. Does the earnest Protagonist actually think he can save the world by calling forth seeds aloud, by hand stitching geothermal fissures together, by manually rewinding the seasons?
The ParkeHarrisons’ artwork insists we create a science that is technical in unexpected ways, alert to consequences in the world, and very, very strange. The performances, sculptural props, and backdrops that beget their highly constructed photographs are outside one medium or another, suggesting science better behave in a likewise manner if we hope to coexist with the planet. The attempts by their besuited character to mend the world are terrifyingly clumsy and yet poignant and beautiful. Which, as it turns out, is also an exact description of the human condition.
- William L. Fox, 2010
Media
Schedule
from February 11, 2011 to March 12, 2011
Opening Reception on 2011-02-10 from 18:00 to 20:00