BEYOND THINGS
Amanda Curreri
DPMT7
Tracy Featherstone
Llewelynn Fletcher
Terence Hammonds
Lydia Rosenberg
Rebecca Steele
Jordan Tate
The Summit A Dolce Hotel Gallery
5345 Medpace Way Cincinnati OH 45227
June 8 to September 30
Alternate Projects is pleased to present Beyond Things, an exhibition sponsored by Cincinnati's new Summit Hotel and organized by Alternate Projects. Beyond Things features the work of seven artists based in the Cincinnati region and a Cincinnati-based collaborative. The pieces-- extractions, commentaries, juxtapositions, collages-- are an enmeshing of the material and cultural. All transcend the apparent and in so doing present new ways of seeing and experiencing the things that define our world.
The work of Vincent Sansalone and Whitney Hamaker of the collective DPMT7, Cyclorama Iteration #5 and their Stelae are reinterpretations of long-established architectural structures. Monumental pillars are poles of aluminum, stacked letters from a neon sign, and an encased Gnome standing on a bed of steel. Their imposing cyclorama moves beyond early iterations when they were large-scale historical paintings exhibited in a purpose built circular building. Now occupying a large shared space, it still tells a story steeped in history though more intimate, a collage, a landscape and while the popularity of the original cycloramas waned with the advent of moving pictures, it is precisely such projected imagery-- Sansalone home movies from the 1960s and 1970s, and 1980s from Mexico, DPMT 7 studio shots from several years ago as well as the actual installation of this piece-- that is the core of Cyclorama Iteration #5.
The tension between art object and art documentation-- what is real and what is artifice is brought to light in Jordan Tate’s photographs of what appear to be pristine exhibitions and exhibition spaces. In actuality, these photographs are created solely in digital space and the viewer is left to wonder whether these are photographs of an exhibition of Tate’s work or just photographs of (possibly illusionary) exhibition spaces. Justine Ludwig states in her essay, This thread is leaking from the heavens, that “...The project poses the question, which is more important—the product or the documentation? He [Tate] also validates the prevalence of imagined space. These images are constructed digitally, allowing for meticulous staging—ranging from atypically shaped frames to ambitious sculptural forms. Tate takes advantage of easily consumable imagery such as art historical reference and meme culture. Memes are any piece of media that is spread through the Internet through mimicry...”
Llewelyn Fletcher’s Standing Sound Costume: Lion, a frontal standing life-size sculpture of an abstracted lion carved out of basswood, is also an experiential meditative sound chamber. Like Shadow Mask: Horse-Wolf, this piece is part of Fletcher’s Interspecies and Inhabitable artworks, whose material-laden frames commonly built around the body, explore themes of human-animal kinship. By taking aim at human exceptionalism, this body of work attempts to shake the long-standing socio-political hierarchy of what the artist feels is an ongoing fight for all differently bodied lives’ right to be.
Referencing the very public mound-like meditative structures found across Asia, with a nod to Chinese landscape painting and cultivated gardens, Tracy Featherstone’s Less Likely Landscapes reenvision the western concept of “interactive sculpture.” Here a coiled ceramic sculpture containing live plants is a garden- or a stupa. On a cart with wheels, it symbolizes both the physical and spiritual transience of life. Its plants now represent a current iteration on the centuries old artifacts the sculpture references.
At first glance Terence Hammond’s replicating prints with their kaleidoscope-imagery look like sheets of wallpaper. Fused in their engaging design, however, is appropriated imagery that memorializes and abstracts histories of racial identity in America. Ornately rendered and with a sense of humanity, the imagery in these prints shows a protest sign with the all-inclusive statement, “Gay power Black power Women power Student power All power to the people,” along with images of sixties radicals and Aretha Franklin.
For Amanda Curreri, particular fabrics-- their design, color, age-- become cultural signifiers weaving layered stories in her abstractly stitched pieces. Textiles are important to Curreri for what she feels is their ability to transcend the mundane and prompt discussions of labor, class, performance of identity, use-value, and notions of time. The title for one of her pieces in the show, Homohime, is a compound English-Japanese word without provenance in either language, and translates to “gay princess.” This odd but celebratory combination exemplifies the spirit of this new body of work.
Rebecca Steele’s multi-piece wall installation, Active Dust Wall, takes an almost indexical approach to the way imagery is captured through various photographic media. For Steele this series is an exploration into the concept of aging and the idea of pause as something both physical as well as something technological, trans-media. She states that, “….Fragmented and refracted color and image elements point to a certain kind of death, which Roland Barthes suggests as the logical implication of every image, while still also containing the possibility of a life after death, a resurrection.”
Lydia Rosenberg’s sculptures made from found materials become abstract gestural expressions of the commonplace- a strand of plastic pearls suggests running water, broken keys hang on a mobile. Rosenberg states that underlying this body of work, she was thinking about, “…what I am making while I wait around for a good idea, unrelated parts coming up with new rules of behavior, evidence of sign or meaning seeking/making up a new symbolic language, a collaboration with daily routines and environments: thinking about how things are made: found evidence of unseen and uncontrolled forces (human/nature/incident) which manipulate materials in the same way I do, looking for commonality, totemic structures carrying an internal logic [and] access.”
Beyond Things opens June 8 with a reception from 6 to 8 PM. This exhibition runs through September 30 and can be viewed 24 hours a day and as with the reception is free and open to the public.
To view the CHECKLIST, go to DOWNLOAD PDF on this page.
All artwork is POR. Contact info@alternateprojects for prices and additional information.