FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Internal and external architectures are mapped and charted in this multi-media exhibition.
Internal Compasses
Opening Night: Friday, May 15, 6 – 9pm
May 15–July 17, 2009
Free; Free Parking
Also opening on May 15:
Efrat Klipshtien (Tel Aviv, Israel)
SPACES World Artists Program>>
Sung Jin Choi
Ambient Sound
SPACELab>>
Image: Tent and Tetons, 2006, Sarah FitzSimons, (film still), multi-media installation
Cleveland, OH, April 17, 2009—Artists, like philosophers, researchers, and scientists demonstrate an obsessive curiosity about the world by way of collecting, deconstructing, and analyzing data in an attempt to unearth secrets buried within natural and manufactured systems. The artists in SPACES’ upcoming Internal Compasses exhibit the ‘emergent’, while revealing the equally engaging inquiry, patterns and processes along the way.
Internal Compasses features visual thinkers who map, code, and catalog experiences and information, then systematically arrange the material evidence according to personal internal strategies. Join SPACES for the opening reception of Internal Compasses on Friday, May 15, 2009 from 6 – 9 p.m. The exhibition will remain on view through July 17, 2009. Admission to the opening reception and during normal gallery hours is free and open to the public.
Derek Coté and Nicole Baumann (Richmond, VA) team up to examine the concept of the gallery as a “Mega Space” and its impact on the artist’s and viewer’s experience. Coté and Baumman build scale models of famous contemporary art galleries to demonstrate the role of architecture in the art experience. Sarah FitzSimons (Athens, OH) builds large-scale outdoor sculptures that mirror the aesthetics of natural landscapes. In a more recent series Tents, the artist uses mountainous terrain as a muse to explore wider patterns found in nature and how we adapt, function and often idealize it. Drawing from her own migration from Eastern to Western culture, Xia Gao (Lincoln, NE) uses the interplay of textile and space to explore how memories, narratives, and contemplations can emerge through layering and pattern of representational images. Greg Murr (Granville, OH) uses satellite images from Google Earth as preliminary maps for drawings and watercolors that examine the gradual transformation of our natural environment through the recorded evolutions of lakes, rivers, lagoons and other bodies of water. Also capitalizing on everyday technology, Michael Sherwin (Morgantown, WV) uses video and photography to present what he terms a “visual geography” emerging from the vast observations and recordings present online and taken from “artists, amateurs, and armchair cartographers.” Susken Rosenthal (Baitz, Land Brandenburg, Germany) creates “portraits” of live soccer games. Through active line drawings created within the standard 90-minute game, the artist creates seismographic, as well as abstract, line drawings that record patterns of movement, energy, and strategy. By capturing ritual and place simultaneously through a long, extended photographic exposure, Eric Sung (Hammond, LA) creates still images that reveal movement and transformation producing a deeply ephemeral result.
Also opening on Friday, May 15, 2009:
SWAP: Efrat Klipshtien (Tel Aviv, Israel) presents new work in a large-scale installation. Klipshtien will continue her residency in Cleveland (through June 8, 2009) working in collaboration with Viva! Dance Studio to complete an upcoming project that will take place outside of the gallery space.
SPACELab: Sung Jin Choi (Brooklyn, NY) presents Ambient Sound an intricate installation composed of found objects intended to evoke cultural nostalgia (On view through June 12, 2009). In Permeability, Transformation and the Neutral (June 19 – July 17, 2009) Evan Larson (Dearborn, MI) employs techniques such as plaster carving, mold-making, and woodworking to manipulate the existing structures within the gallery, thereby creating a seemingly-organic space of neutrality between object and viewer within institutional dynamics.
