7 June 2013 to 13 July 2013
Wednesday - Saturday, 12 - 6pm or by appointment
INVISIBLE-EXPORTS
14A Orchard Street
(between. Hester and Canal Street)
10002
New York, NY
New York
North America
T: +1 212 226 5447
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W: www.invisible-exports.com
Featuring works by Vik Muniz & The Philadelphia Wireman
June 7 - July 13, 2013 Opening Reception: Friday, June 7 6-8pm
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INVISIBLE-EXPORTS is pleased to present OEDIPUS AND SPHINX (Pictures of Junk), an exhibition featuring work by Vik Muniz and the Philadelphia Wireman.
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The cerebral iconoclastic Brazilian-born multimedia appropriation artist Vik Muniz has spent two decades reinterpreting and re-contextualizing touchstones of the Western canon by recreating them with unfamiliar, surprising, and often undignified materials -- food, cotton balls, garbage, dirt, and toys – in an ongoing effort to interrogate authorship and representation. In the work presented here, Oedipus and Sphinx (Pictures of Junk), Muniz reproduced Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres’ exalted painting Oedipus and the Sphinx (1808) with materials sourced from a junkyard in a favela outside of Sao Paolo. Both works depict Oedipus, the great icon of hubris and human ignorance, at the moment he solves the "riddle" that had so long stymied his countrymen, redefining the terms of the puzzle ("What animal walks with four legs in the morning, two in the afternoon, and three in the evening?") not as a meditation on everyday life but as a reflection on eternity and posterity (his answer is man, who progresses from infancy to adulthood and cane-assisted old age). Muniz’s practice is clearly steeped in a deep knowledge of art history, a skilled manipulation of contemporary conceptual ideas, and a successful participation in the upper echelons of the global art market.
The Philadelphia Wireman is perhaps the purest example of the artistic archetype of Outsider -- not just overlooked by and disengaged from the art world of his time, but completely unknown, even after his death and the discovery of his work, except by the objects themselves. Those works -- sculptural collages, which enclose found elements within bundled wraps of steel wire -- were discovered in the late 1970s on a Philadelphia street within a pile meant for trash pick-up. It is not known when the works were made (though some elements contained within the work suggest the 1970s) or where, or by whom, though because of where they were discovered, many believe the sculptor to be an African-American working-class man with ready professional access to heavy-gauge wire-working tools. And yet, despite their being produced in obscurity, the works exhibit all the hallmarks of a rigorous and conscientious art practice.
Special thanks to Yasaman and Vuk Djunic, and Lucas Ajemian.
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INVISIBLE-EXPORTS is located in the Lower East Side, at 14A Orchard Street, just north of Canal. PLEASE NOTE OUR SUMMER HOURS: Wednesday through Saturday, noon to 6pm, and by appointment. For more information, call 212 226 5447 or email: info@invisible-exports.com
"I use light as a material to work the medium of perception, basically the work really has no object because perception is the object. And there is no image because I am not interested in associative thought."
- James Turrell
PIPPY HOULDSWORTH GALLERY, London presents RUTH CLAXTON - Specular Spectacular
7 June - 6 July 2013
Specular Spectacular is a complex maze that occupies the 'centre stage' of the gallery.
Interconnecting structures hold mirrors that both become part of and reflect the installation itself.
Worlds within worlds are housed here, and inhabited by found figurines that are themselves swallowed up by amorphous reflective masks.
Icelandic nature is prominent in Eliasson's work, and his artistic relationship with it often involves collection or documentation that is scientific in tone. The country becomes a sensory laboratory where ideas can be developed and evolved into art, as evidenced in the multiple photographic series that would seem to witness a near compulsive need for collecting.
