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::Topographic::
::::: January 21 - March 11, 2005
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Does
the word landscape evoke images of mushroom cloud playhouses, movie
sets or airline disasters? The outside
world collides with inner space in this multi-media exhibition of
work by 10 artists who use everything from oil paint to web streaming
to reveal truths about nature, suburbia, and urban civilization.
Experience the way artists expand and compress space to offer their perspective on landscape. Grounding her nomadic existence in a virtual place, German artist Isabelle Jenniches (Amsterdam, NL) collects webcam images of a volcano in Japan. Her series of ethereal pictures is interrupted by gaps of missing data and a collage of news and pop-culture images streaming to her computer from Japan. Richard Garrison (Delmar, NY) uses Global Positioning System to survey the urban and suburban parking lots near his home. Replicating these places in the gallery, Garrison's installation of precisely cut pieces of asphalt paper becomes an austere, displaced map. Diane Meyer's (Brooklyn, NY) photographs take us cross country from an east coast office building in the path of a tornado to mountain backdrops of Hollywood westerns, parodying the way media images affect our perceptions of the landscape. Sticking close to home amid ever-expanding suburban developments, Mark Slankard (Huntington, WV) photographs ordinary things: houses, cars, driveways, and mailboxes. His manipulations of focus and perspective heighten the sense of isolation, alienation, and conformity that counter suburbia's rhetoric of welcome, safety, and privacy. Enter the surreal with artists who create new worlds out of the beautiful or terrifying stuff of this one. Neil MacDonald (Kent, OH) paints eerily beautiful, diffused landscapes that depict moments from the aftermath of various airline crashes of the last 20 years. The striations in MacDonald's paintings freeze time, allowing the viewer to bear witness to a landscape that appears romantic yet is scarred by catastrophic mechanical failure and human error. Dietrich Wegner (Springfield, OH) offers a darkly humorous comment on this country's position of power and vulnerability, with a full-scale children's playhouse built from a mushroom cloud. Nuclear radiation might contribute to the lush, acid colors and melting vegetation in the beautifully crafted paintings of Dan Kopp (Brooklyn, NY), whose images suggest a grim world of a future long emptied of human civilization, a ghostly echo of colorful cartoon landscapes. While some artists observe and reflect the landscape, others create new, reconfigured ones. Between towers symbolizing Eastern and Western cities, a tiny ocean slowly seeps through a plaster plain and rains down on sugar mountains in Yoshiko Kanai's (Brooklyn, NY) poetic sculpture. The water erodes a new shape to the land in this handmade microcosm of our fragile globe. Nicole Gordon (Chicago, IL) loads her paintings of imagined places with such a profusion of personal, art historical, and abstract objects that they extend beyond the paintings along the wall or out onto the floor. Mark Taylor (Brooklyn, NY) combines cartoon-style forms with everyday materials to create "situations" - fluid, heterogeneous installations that often represent a specific place in terms of sight, sound, touch, memory, and free association. A Selection Committee composed of Joanne Cohen, Jason Lee, and Royden Watson assembled this exhibition from local, regional and national submissions to SPACES. Also
on view: Opening
Reception on Friday, Jan 21, from 5-9pm; FREE Closing Reception: Friday, Mar 11, 2005, 5 - 9 pm. Image at left: Isabelle Jenniches SPACES is a non-profit, artist-run, alternative space gallery. Since 1978, SPACES has given over 8,000 artists in the visual and performing arts an arena in which to present challenging new ideas. SPACES is located at 2220 Superior Viaduct on the West side of the Flats. Superior Viaduct runs parallel to the Detroit Superior Bridge at the intersection of West 25th Street. |
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