In her site-specific installation Pigeon, Christina Gundersen explores notions of power, control, and loss, which were first initiated in her ongoing series of black-and-white paintings, Fallen. With Pigeon, Gundersen creates an elegant and uneasy environment that challenges our conventional relationship to photography and space. Gundersen situates an antique pigeon coop atop a pedestal in the middle of the gallery, and scatters a series of glass plates, overlaying shadowy photographs of pigeons, around the coop and across the gallery floor. The photographic installation takes on a sculptural presence: viewers must navigate the space, moving in and around the glass plates in order to see the pigeons, which are only represented by their shadows—an ambiguous yet portentous sign. These ubiquitous birds are conspicuously absent; their shadows, captured and encased in glass, are now permanent reminders of their presence. By placing the photographs on the floor rather than on the walls, Gundersen physically shifts our conventional relationship to the subjects of her work and the object nature of her photographs, creating a new, unresolved narrative in the process.
Power Gesture (front) and Leg Bouncer: Stress Expresser (back) from Beyond Words: Expressive Gestures
Investigating modes of communication through bodily expression, Jennifer Crupi creates a group of interactive, prosthetic-like proposals for instruments of gestural expression. Each sculpture imagines and presents a different outlet for stress, excitement, and the desire to communicate through body language and self-discovery. By viewing and interacting with the work, the artist seeks to illicit the underlying reasons for our seemingly casual gestures.
Installation view: Breaking Roots, 2010
Installation view: Breaking Roots, 2010
Installation view: Breaking Roots, 2010
Breaking Roots (detail)
In Breaking Roots, sculptor Shannon Gagne addresses the fragility and cyclical nature of life. Personal and universal narratives intertwine as Gagne blends the artifacts of motherhood with basic elements of the earth. Melted baby jars and food containers holding colorless clay sprout-like shoots within, spread across the gallery floor. The manipulated vessels extend to various areas of the gallery. The forms engage with the environment they inhabit, extending into corners, columns and partitions and converge with horn-like vessels fastened to the gallery wall. Delicate yet formidable, Gagne’s installation speaks to the constant tension that exists between beginning and end, renewal and decay, and permanence and the ephemeral.
New York-based artist Elaine Kaufmann creates a series of arresting pencil drawings that connect the fantasies of first-world affluence with the production of third-world poverty. Conflating poverty with luxury and decay with beauty, Kaufmann’s works speak to the problematic representation of economic desires as described by the mass media. The arrangement of her drawings on the gallery walls subtly mimic the formal layouts of magazine or newspaper spreads. Kaufmann’s drawings draw attention to the physical act of reading and the complex relationships that exist between text and image.
Anna Daegele is a New Haven-based painter whose large-scale paintings reveal a penchant for alchemy and exploration into the language of abstraction. Daegele extends her painting surface to lids, tins, and environmental materials such as dirt, lint, and debris from everyday use and activity. Daegele exhibits new work that engages in her long-standing investigation into the sublime, the marred, the ephemeral, and the grotesque. The works range from small to large in scale, speaking to the effects of nature over time from both macrocosmic and microcosmic proportions. Taken together, Daegele's exhibition further addresses the paradoxical relationship between nature and artifice, and the beauty of decay.
Please click thumbnail to view more images.