LECTURE SERIES: SUBJECTIVE HISTORIES OF SCULPTURE
Image: Lucy Skaer, The Good Ship Blank and Ballast, 2010. Courtesy the artist. Photo: Matt Carter. Organized with the Vera List Center for Art and Politics
The New School
Free admission Lucy Skaer
Wednesday, February 29, 6:30pm
Wollman Hall
65 West 11th Street (enter at 66 West 12th Street), 5th floor Nairy Baghramian
Thursday, March 15, 6:30pm
Theresa Lang Community and Student Center
55 West 13th Street, 2nd floor Joseph Meckseper
Monday, April 9, 6:30pm
Please note this lecture will take place at SculptureCenter SculptureCenter, in collaboration with the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School, is excited to continue the artist-led lecture series Subjective Histories of Sculpture. This program, initiated in 2006, furthers SculptureCenter's exploration of how contemporary artists think about sculpture; its history and its legacies. This year, three artists have been invited to present their own take on art history: Lucy Skaer, Nairy Baghramian, and Josephine Meckseper. Citing specific works, bodies of work, texts, or even personal anecdotes taken from inside and outside cultural production, and inside and outside art, these subjective, incomplete, partial, or otherwise eclectic histories question assumptions and propose alternative methods for understanding sculpture's evolving strategies. Lucy Skaer is a multi-disciplinary artist working in sculpture, photography, installation, printmaking, and film, who displaces the familiar through manipulations in scale and material. Her resulting works embrace multiplicity and abstraction while questioning our day-to-day perception and supposed knowledge of the world. Transformations of existing artifacts and architectural elements create a loss of bearing and question the reliability of memory and history itself. Skaer often incorporates pre-existing imagery or found forms to re-imagine and re-materialize history in objects whose meanings migrate and become transposed as they take on different forms. Her sculpture and works on paper create a type of linguistic system, one that merges subject and object and favors open gestures rather than distinct references. Working in sculptural installations and photography, Nairy Baghramian engages interior design, literature, and art historical debates around minimalism in order to comment on current issues of materiality, manufacture, and display. Her practice examines political and social systems of power, encompassing questions of context, institutional framing and the production and reception of contemporary art. Baghramian’s work possesses a sense of immediacy that favors the physicality of the object itself. Baghramian’s sleek, polished aluminum pieces and cast rubber forms taken on a corporeal identity, often arranged in intimate mise en scènes to highlight the absence of a body while imbuing the forms themselves with a degree of bodily presence. Josephine Meckseper examines a pertinent dimension of our material world, representing practices that foreground art objects as commodities. She explores not only connections with the art market, but also how objects can escape meaning, status, and fixed purpose with changing contexts and configurations. Through carefully arranged installations, photographs, and videos, Meckseper exposes the relationship between politics and the consumer worlds of advertising and fashion. She presents various hybridized forms of display that comment on the homogenous culture that capitalism has created. Meckseper looks for new ways to subvert normative mass culture in order to re-contextualize images and signs that have become inflated from over-proliferation. Positioning objects such as a toilet plunger, a stuffed white rabbit, and perfume bottles, the artist’s work reveals the absurdity of materialism’s manifestations. For more information and program updates please visit www.sculpture-center.org. UPCOMING EVENTS:
Spring Benefit: Lucky Draw
SculptureCenter
Wednesday, April 4, 2012
Lucky Draw – a one of a kind art raffle – guarantees that each and every ticket holder walks home with a work of art! This fast-paced one night event offers first time and seasoned collectors access to artworks by top emerging and established talent. All proceeds benefit SculptureCenter. Tickets now on sale. You may purchase tickets online or by calling Frederick Janka, 718.361.1750 x 117.
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