Real World
The dissolving space of experience
Katie Grinnan, Wade Guyton, Christina Mackie, Bojan Sarcevic, Paul Sietsema, Hiroshi Sugito
Modern Art Oxford
25 September - 28 November 2004
Six artists working internationally reconsider the nature of the sculptural object and its relationship to space in this new exhibition at Modern Art Oxford. The work of Katie Grinnan, Wade Guyton, Christina Mackie, Bojan Sarcevic, Paul Sietsema and Hiroshi Sugito engages with the articulation of image, information, and cultural and social economies that shape contemporary perception. Their built up and assembled objects, structures and spatial scenarios suggest new artistic attitudes in which indeterminacy, resistance and the convergence of multiple spheres of experience are the new creative conditions for understanding space and the way we inhabit it.
Katie Grinnan [b. 1970, Richmond, lives in Los Angeles] creates complex and fantastical sculptures from photographs, found, moulded and modelled objects. Distorted space, actual space and remembered space are activated and collapsed into new constructed forms. In Real World, the artist presents a new sculptural work consisting of dissolving figures, magic brews, and a New Age constructivist tower which she will install in the galleries.
Wade Guyton [b. 1972, Hammond, Tennessee, lives in New York City] describes his sculptures and drawings as Ôacts of protestÕ. The relationship between image and object is central to his work which ranges from crossed out images of vernacular architecture and modernist abstract sculpture to elegant plywood constructions and vast impenetrable objects.
Christina Mackie [b. 1958, Oxford, lives in London] describes her mixed media installations of sculpted and assembled objects, drawings and videos as paintings. Her elaborate works articulate interests in parallel worlds of knowledge and experience and the points at which they intersect. Integral to her installations is the experience of the viewer, which is often orchestrated around structural props and stages.
In his compelling sculptural explorations Paul Sietsema [b. 1968, lives in Los Angeles] unravels and reconfigures relationships between spaces and the objects inhabiting them. His mesmeric film, Empire (2002), presented at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2003 and included in Real World, is a journey through historically specific spaces from the eighteenth century rococo interior of the Hôtel Soubise in Paris, to the 1960s modernist apartment of art critic Clement Greenberg. The figures and interiors, all seemingly real but in fact meticulously crafted by the artist, fade in and out of an absorbing prismatic haze. Drawings and a new sculptural work relating to Empire will also be presented in the exhibition.
At the heart of the work of Bojan Sarcevic [b. 1974, Belgrade, lives in Berlin] is a displacement of materials, places, people and things to create situations that are dysfunctional or incongruous. Moving between sculpture, architecture, photography and film, his works are melancholy encounters between object, space and viewer. The exhibition includes Sarcevic's large-scale sculpture, Ou la main nÕentre pas, la chaleur sÕinsue (Where the hand doesn't enter, heat infuses) (2002) and 1954 (2004), a series of 78 photographic collages in which the artist has incised and reassembled views of modernist interiors with a fractured appliquŽ of image and forms.
Hiroshi Sugito [b. 1970, Nagoya, lives in Nagoya] makes enigmatic paintings in which images and spaces float in a visual reverie of remembered experience. Trained by Yoshitomo Nara in the school of traditional Japanese painting, Hiroshi Sugito builds up his images of vaporous views of dreamlike interiors and hazy sea and landscapes through a meticulous process of layering and covering over. Working from the minute to the monumental in scale, his paintings are a meditative conversation on the motif which seems to separate itself from its pictorial support to declare itself in the world of three dimensional objects.
Real World. The dissolving space of experience is curated by Modern Art Oxford's Senior Curator, Suzanne Cotter.
A fully illustrated book featuring reproductions of work by the artists and new essays by writer and critic Michael Archer and Suzanne Cotter is available from 1 October 2004.
MODERN ART OXFORD
30 Pembroke Street, Oxford OX1 1BP
