Constance Armellino "Resisting the Immaterial"
Stephan Stoyanov Gallery
This event has ended.
Constance Armellino's colorful and carefully crafted post-minimal sculptures are ripped of any highbrow attitude. Cast on the basis of objects that make up our industrial urban infrastructure-drainpipes, waterways and construction materials-the works create a web of tension and anticipation in the gallery space. They embody the idea that change is not only possible but also inevitable and already bubbling out from below the grid of everyday life. Occupying the storefront of the gallery, the large-scale sculpture Spillway II-a drainpipe cast in plaster with cyanide blue paint spilling out from its center like an abject birthday cake-attracts the immediate attention of the spectator. In a reinterpretation of a classical white-cube critique, the sculpture poses as a curtain dividing front stage and backstage. While its front resembles a nature morte of stiffened pigment spilling onto the floor, it shows its backside as a pointy and crude scaffolding structure. Armellino draws on the drainpipe as an industrial object of beauty as well as a metaphor spill and overflow, but her work is no pure fascination of industrial objects. Instead, she uses the idea of a social urban infrastructure to speak to the imminent need for the creation of a public around the work of art. As well, The Paradiso Fountain II-the other major sculptural work in the exhibition-thematizes the fountain as a gathering point and a social outlet as well as a site for collecting drinking water. Here, the water is turned from drinkable to waste by adding toilet bowl cleaner tablets, while kitschy prefabricated plastic party fountains on top of the structure adheres to the commodification of social life. Gleaming with light and circulating its water in fifteen minute-intervals the sculpturemakes a powerful statement on the current condition of our public sphere. The video Navigating Space uses a simple gesture, a speedometer whose needle shifts restlessly up and down, to add to the investigation of change and anticipation.
The title of the show points to the poignant realism of the works. Resisting the Immaterial aims to return the quality of utopias to art and to the spaces that art inhabit, without falling back into revolutionary nostalgia or re-enactment of times past. Instead, it aims to create a space for contemporaneity and action. The show is curated by Maibritt Borgen (b. 1981, DK).
Media
Schedule
from February 25, 2012 to April 01, 2012
Being in the Present Tense performance: Sunday, March 18, 2pm
Opening Reception on 2012-02-25 from 17:00 to 20:00