Andrew Piedilato

Andrew Piedilato, Castle, 2008

Andrew Piedilato, Horse, 2008

Andrew Piedilato, Q-bert, 2008

www.andrewpiedilato.com

Ariel Schlesinger mechanical sculpture

Ariel Schlesinger

Ariel Schlesinger, Untitled (Masking tape), 2003

In Ariel Schlesinger’s Untitled (2008) two tea biscuits lean against each other, propped up to form what seems to be the pitched roof of a tiny refuge. Windows cropped at the top of the photograph bathe the breakfast table scene in a cold white light; their presence reminds us that should they be opened, wind and rain would threaten the lives of hundreds of crumbs scattered on the tabletop. Dipped in the still steeping tea that stands nearby, the top of the tiny sculpture has been pinched and bent over to stabilize its acute angle. Schlesinger references the spontaneous engineering of food play but transforms what would otherwise have been a precarious ‘house of cards’ design into a small monument to random acts of creativity.
Freakish mutants, staged resurrections and peculiar inventions; Schlesinger’s works are weird science for the sake of the beautifully uncanny. In Forever Young (2005), a single ash burns perpetually in a cracked ashtray at the gallery entrance. A soggy cardboard box, Zu Erinnern und Zu Vergessen (To Remember and To Forget, 2008), holds a shallow puddle of water that somehow never seeps out onto the gallery floor. Rolls of masking tape, joined – like Siamese twins – at their cardboard cores, stand on a pedestal in Untitled (Masking Tape) (2008).
For L’Angoisse de la page blanche (The Anguish of the White Page, 2007), two sheets of standard-size copy paper are pressed up against each other as they spin in circles on a low table. A homemade arcade game, Untitled (Football Players) (1999) is poetic play with fear and dread, child-like toying with the idea of death: when the viewer-player pushes down on two metal levers covered in duct tape, a high voltage transformer sends buzzing charges up and down the bodies of two metal footballers. The game’s apparently haphazard construction disguises a deliberate design, which is calculated down to details such as the decorative quality of plywood panels at its base and a strip of packing tape around two edges of its Plexiglass case. This is also the case in Untitled (Burned Turkmenistan Carpet III and IV) (2008), for which the seemingly casual act of burning two rolled-up oriental carpets creates a series of long, repeated lacerations that play off of the detailed geometric designs in the carpets’ intricate weaving.
As art historian Rudi Fuchs writes in the note to his lecture ‘Conflicts with Modernism or The Absence of Schwitters’,1 ‘in the end, art-making is a process of magic.’ Schlesinger calls attention to the magic nature of the artwork but purposefully reveals all of the secrets to his tricks. Two white wires taped to the gallery floor lead from a low platform, where Forever Young is displayed, to a wall socket, giving away the fact that the glowing ash is actually the end of an optic fiber. The two white pages of L’Angoisse de la page blanche perform their courtly dance on a table whose legs are fashioned from tip-less spray cans. The battered cans draw attention to the table’s underside where a small motor is revealed as the dynamo driving the paper’s animation. The flaps at the bottom of the cardboard box in Zu Erinnern und Zu Vergesse (The commemorable and the forgettable, 2008) are not tightly closed but leave gaps from which water should be leak, but oddly it doesn’t. This small detail provides a clue that inveigles its way into the mind of the attentive observer and betrays the illusion: the box’s bottom is not saturated but coated with water-resistant wax.

Ian Pedigo

Ian Pedigo, Continuity Interrupted by the Appearance of a Solution, 2007

Ian Pedigo, Persuader to enclosed space (civic messages), 2008

Ian Pedigo, Fragments, 2005 

Ian Pedigo, Blind, blocks, 2007

The work of American sculptor Ian Pedigo enjoys a unique mobility among the aesthetic of refuse currently collecting in some of the main arteries of the art world. Largely eschewing the impulse to stretch art’s formal terms to reductive breaking points, Pedigo’s work instead uses a certain formal complexity to enter into – if not to synthesize – a number of different discourses. For his first solo show in Europe, the Alaska-born, New York-based artist presents five sculptures and two wall works, offering a restrained yet incisive introduction to his practice. Pedigo composes objects from found materials that range from scraps of wood to cardboard to magazine clippings to swatches of cloth, Plexiglas and multicoloured electrical tape. Working in the historical mode of assemblage, the artist hybridizes found objects in the venerable tradition of Bruce Conner and the late Robert Rauschenberg, for their deployment of recycled stuff, as well as Richard Tuttle, for his use of transparent plastics, among other things. Gedi Sibony is an easy mark when discussing Pedigo’s work, for their kindred materials, but any other resemblance ends there; it would be altogether more compelling to bring up the work of, say, Manfred Pernice and Ian Kiaer.
Persuader to enclosed space (civic messages) (2008), courtesy Pianissimo, MilanPersuader to enclosed space (civic messages) (2008), the first work one comes across on entering the gallery, is made of a white, patterned cardboard box, cut and geometrically articulated so as to resemble a maquette of sci-fi futuristic architecture. The cardboard is placed on a low pedestal made from a grey formica-covered countertop, the base of which is painted in blue and orange. Pedigo’s distinctly drab, second-hand store palette feels similar to that of Pernice (whose palette, incidentally, seems to draw heavily from Berlin’s U-Bahns), while the maquette quality of the object brings to mind Kiaer’s precious intimations of utopian architectures, countering the British artist’s delicacy with a laboured, highly structured ruggedness. However, Pedigo’s practice seems to have fully internalized the interest in architecture, incorporating it into its formal vocabulary, as opposed to creating sculpture about architecture. In other works these concerns become less apparent, but are nevertheless still there. Surroundings are Left Open (2008), which comprises gridded swatches of fabric partially circled by a taped-down string, comes off as a topographical depiction of a building or a compound. Wall from Distant Memory (2006-8) and Glacier-rich Avenues (2008), play out sci-fi tropes a bit more conspicuously. Incorporating a used wooden doorframe, wool, Plexiglas, a plastic sheet, and wooden sticks, the inclined form of Glacier-rich Avenues brought to mind a kind of space ship. As did the more painterly Wall from Distant Memory, despite primarily doubling as the silhouette of a skyline, which consisted of pyramidal cardboard shape attached and propped against the wall by a series of two-by-twos, jutting out from the top and bottom of the cardboard’s borders. About to Clear (2008) is the work that most patently synthesizes the numerous formal stakes of the show. The cylindrical form of the work, along with the corrugated craft paper that envelops the lower section of the structure, is initially evocative of Pernice’s urban emblems – his columns or rubbish bins. But the insertion of lighting gels, which suggest windows, along with the bamboo sticks rising up from its hollow centre, which suggest antennae, shifts the work towards a kind of sci-fi tower maquette or even the fuselage of a rocket poised for take-off. In this way, Pedigo’s shape-shifting sculptures are made to wear the different hats of severely articulated detritus, sci-fi motifs or architecture, and anonymous, urban elements, all of which are fused together to form a soundly ramshackle whole.

- Chris Sharp

Article from: Frieze Magazine

Ideas for a painting

Manfred Pernice

Manfred Pernice, Commerzbank, 2004

Manfred Pernice, Sekretär, 1999

Manfred Pernice creates sculptures that vaguely suggest cargo holds, architectural fragments, and utopian models for larger, unrealizable buildings. His work stems from a long-standing interest in containers—whether buildings or shipping vessels—as symbols for our obsession with systematizing, categorizing, packaging, and regulating. Constructed out of the humblest of building materials, such as plywood and chipboard, his structures have a deliberately makeshift and provisional appearance. He frequently adds found materials, such as photographs or magazine clippings, to the surfaces—interruptions that further muddle the meaning of the works by making it unclear whether we are looking at interior or exterior, a volumetric structure or a support for something else. The uncertainty engendered by this oscillation between form and function is the conceptual crux of Pernice’s practice; untamed and unfinished, his works are like open-ended propositions. Sekretär (1999) is emblematic of this ambiguity. The piece was first shown at the Villa Merkel in Esslingen, Germany, an exhibition space that was once the private home of a German industrialist. On the one hand, the work suggests domestic furniture—specifically, an oversize desk with a bookshelf, or secretary. At the same time, allusions to walls, windows, and structural supports imply an architectural structure. Pernice often develops his sculptures from tiny cardboard maquettes and drawings, which provide clues to his thought process. In one of the drawings for Sekretär, the artist wrote “the secretary lives here” over what resembles a building elevation, hinting at the structure as a small dwelling or a proposal for some future residence.

Extract from: Guggenheim.org Recent Aquisitions: Contemporary sculpture Nov 19 2004 – Jan 27 2005

Nancy Shaver

Nancy Shaver, RED, scraps of blue and yellow, 2004

Nancy Shaver, In Sickness and beauty, 1992

In art, the relationship between making and selling is often
conflicted. But not for Nancy Shaver, whose harmonious show
titled “Retail” pairs recent sculptures with objects from
Henry, a store the artist runs in Hudson, New York.

The materials and processes of Shaver’s sculptures are
humble and methodical: Small, wobbly-looking blocks of wood
are painted with bright house paint or wrapped in found
fabric, and then grouped into colorful grids. The assemblages
hang on the wall in skewed wooden frames or rest atop
wheeled carts. Distributed among the sculptures is a collection
of antiques, ranging from the unusual (a polychrome ceramic
pig) to the banal (a milk crate full of rusted rearview mirrors).

The sculptures and cash-and-carry objects interact casually in
the cluttered installation: A white sock is draped over a low
cube of cloth-covered blocks; an ink drawing on silk hangs on
the back of a beat-up metal rocking chair. In some
configurations, the sculptures function as display elements for
the found objects; in others, the found objects serve as mere
finishing touches for the sculptures.

When faced with contemporary art that nods to its own status
as a commodity, viewers are conditioned to look for critique.
But the combination of art objects and objets d’art in “Retail”
seems intended not to question the relative value of each, but
rather to make a case for their affinity. As the poet Ann
Lauterbach puts it in a statement accompanying the
exhibition: “We, Nancy and I, share a love of necessary
objects…We believe, also, that art is necessary.”

—Roger White

Article from: Time Out New York / Issue 607 : May 17–23, 2007

‘RED, scraps of blue and yellow’ reminds me alot of one of one of my own little skits…

SamKelly, Happy 50th Birthday Claire, 2008

Ideas for an installation

Fresias abstraction

Sam Kelly, Fresias, 2008

Matt Fanks

Matt Franks, It’s so hard to tell who’s going to love you the best, 2008

Pippy Houldsworth is delighted to present a show of new works by Matt Franks, whose first solo exhibition Transcendent Plastic Infinite at Tate Britain’s Art Now space in 2002 brought him to prominence in the UK. At Houldsworth, Franks will display his latest body of work comprising a series of hybrid sculptures developed from his typically mock baroque aesthetic.


The exhibition title is borrowed from a folk song by Karen Dalton, reflecting the artist’s ongoing tumultuous love affair with his work. The anxiety which underlies the process of making is founded on the desire for success. Yet, no matter the planning, there is always an element of improvisation, putting the artist’s association with the work beyond his control. As with any relationship there can be no certainty of the outcome.

References to modernism are prevalent in the works in their theatrical posturing. Despite this, Franks opts for materials that deny the works the monumentality of their modernist predecessors, instead preferring styrofoam, mdf, plastic and yak hair. Similarly the development of the surface contradicts archetypal sculpture. The materials themselves, which are soft and rich, belong to luxury goods and interior design. The surface texture therefore disputes the autonomy of the art object whilst raising questions of taste.

 

Extract from: re-title.com newsletter – Sculpture & Installation May-June 2008

The idea of subverting the furvor for creating ideals and utopias, which was a distinct aspect of the modernist agenda, appeals to me. It is something I would hope for my own work to achieve. The above writer associates Matt Frank’s juxtaposition of a referencing “posture” with low brow materials within his sculptures, with this notion. I think this is an undercurrent in the particular way I use materials and references.
I also think this is an underlying theme in the way a lot of contemporary artists use materials, as juxtaposed with referenciality. For example, the mixed bag of materials and souces for those materials, used by sculptors such as Sarah Sze, Ariel Schlesinger and Tomoko Takahashi. The found objects in these artists’ works are used in what appears to be a fashion similar to that of Rauschenberg. However, when juxtaposed with the repeated use of the same mass produced objects this singular reading breaks down and seems to reference not only Duchamp and Rauschenberg’s use of found material, and the ideas that are inherent there, but they also seems to refernce everyday life in an experiecial kind of way. This bredth of dechiperable meanings for one or more objects is something that is key to such post modernist schools of thourght as post structuralism. but also Although others might not include such concise