It's a busy weekend for The Aldrich Museum! Their Gala, honoring Tom Sachs, is planned for Saturday evening, May 2. On Sunday, May 3, some artistically intriguing and innovative exhibits are set to open.
The Aldrich presents: Circumstance May 3 through October 25, 2015
Circumstance will highlight inspiration and its influence across object-making, through the specifically commissioned work of six multi-generational artists. The exhibition will underscore the intersection of installation art and exhibition design, and show how the convergence of fine art, design, and non-art objects within the exhibition format informs and elucidates creative expression.
For six months, the entire museum facility—whose distinctive galleries range from the intimate to the spacious—will be transformed into “rooms” designed by the exhibiting artists, which will “read” as total works of art as they show their own work alongside objects and/or artworks by other artists they have selected. In some instances, works may extend outside of the Museum’s walls, providing alternative ways of perceiving space by offering extended lines of sight across the campus. In doing so, Circumstance attempts to explore the interstices where art and object come together, come apart, and reunify, by examining context, its many shifts and permutations, and tracing the movement of art and objects from the studio to the museum.
In the captivating maze of intersecting rooms, craft, found, utilitarian, historical design, and everyday objects will sit beside works of art, informing us as to how artists take inspiration from what is around them. Selected artworks and objects will enhance our “reading” and innovatively offer—vis-à-vis a visual form of storytelling—intersecting and interdynamic narratives about these works of art and their makers, confronting us with larger questions about history, culture, and society. Participating artists Virginia Poundstone, Nancy Shaver, Ruby Sky Stiler, Penelope Umbrico, Elif Uras, and B. Wurtz will take center stage in the development, conceptualization, and reception of their work, as the Museum assists them to reveal never-before-seen aspects of their practice.
Virginia Poundstone: Flower Mutations
Reception: Sunday, May 3
Taking formal inspiration from Giacomo Balla's series ofFuturist Flowers as well as traditional American flower-pattern quilts, Virginia Poundstone (b. 1977, Great Lakes, Illinois) will present a new outdoor sculpture and an earthwork on the Museum’s grounds and curate an interior room of artworks and objects that investigate the visual representation of flowers through abstraction in art and design. The outdoor sculpture, a geometric flower in stone and glass that will stand eight feet tall, is based on the geometry of a traditional quilt pattern. It will be placed in the interior courtyard, where it can also be viewed from inside the Museum’s atrium, enveloped from behind by a blanket of colorful tulips (more than 3,000 bulbs have already been planted in eight dynamic color hues) that will cover the sloping grassy embankment to form a resplendent garden. Inside the Museum’s expansive Project Space and Balcony Gallery, visitors will encounter new glass sculptures by Poundstone, as well as a monumental wall print of Rainbow Rose (2013), alongside seminal inspirational works by artists that span generations and art historical movements. Alongside these influential works on loan from institutions around the country, Poundstone will also include objects from her own collection. Curated by Amy Smith-Stewart.
Virginia Poundstone, Rainbow Rose, 2013
Courtesy of the artist
Nancy Shaver: Reconciliation
Reception: Sunday, May 3
Nancy Shaver (b. 1946, Appleton, New York) is known for work that utilizes found objects to speak about the sociology of material culture–particularly fabric–and how economics are manifested in clothing and the worlds of decoration and embellishment. For Reconciliation, her exhibition at The Aldrich, she will juxtapose recent sculpture made from women’s clothing fabric and other materials and objects found in rural thrift stores with Depression-era photographs by Walker Evans (who was one of her teachers) and images of the artist, fabric, and clothing designer Sonia Delaunay. Shaver feels her practice resides midway between the work of these artists: the make-do aesthetics of those living in poverty revealed in Evans’s photographs, and the Modernist, high-art 1920s Parisian fashion world of Delaunay. Support for this exhibition has been provided by The Coby Foundation. Curated by Richard Klein.
Ruby Sky Stiler: Ghost Versions
Reception: Sunday, May 3
Penelope Umbrico: Shallow Sun
Reception: Sunday, May 3
Penelope Umbrico’s (b. 1957, Philadelphia) photographic process has led to her being labeled an archivist and collector, as she increasingly utilizes Internet images from sources as diverse as Flickr, eBay, and Craigslist. For her Aldrich project, Umbrico will place her practice in the continuum of the evolving history of photographic imagery. The Museum’s camera obscura will become a starting point to explore the technologies of both analog and digital reproduction and how we are at a point where light—traditionally the most central element of photography—has become disembodied from the natural world, with even the sun itself being reduced to a mere artifact. Umbrico will place a “sunset” (streaming images of the sun found on the Internet) on a monitor outside the camera obscura, creating a sun image inside the camera that, although produced naturally by light entering the camera’s pinhole, is actually an artifact that has been “reprocessed” through traditional photographic means. Curated by Richard Klein.
Elif Uras: Nicaea
Reception: Sunday, May 3
The paintings and ceramic sculptures of Elif Uras (b. 1972, Ankara, Turkey) explore what she describes as “shifting notions of gender and class within the context of the East-West paradigm.” Uras will transform The Aldrich’s Screening Room into an interior courtyard, a prominent feature in traditional Turkish architecture, using sculptures made in Iznik (Nicaea), an ancient city that was celebrated for its tile and ceramic production during the Ottoman Empire. Uras took inspiration from ancient Greek vases depicting male figures tending the olive fields and making pottery; now female workers, artisans, and entrepreneurs, populate and manage these industries. Uras honors this gender reversal by placing the modern Turkish woman center stage. A functioning ceramic fountain will grace the gallery, while small vessels offer a nod to their inherent domesticity. The exhibition will include an original Iznik plate from the first half of the sixteenth century, loaned by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, positioned in dialogue with Uras’s work. Support for this exhibition has been provided by the SAHA Association. Curated by Amy Smith-Stewart.
B. Wurtz: Four Collections
Reception: Sunday, May 3
B. Wurtz (b. 1948, Pasadena, California) has since 1990 produced an ongoing body of work that he refers to as “pan paintings.” These wall pieces are made from ordinary supermarket aluminum food containers, as well as larger roasting pans purchased at kitchen goods stores. He paints over the patterns and texts on the exterior of the pans with various colors of acrylic paint. These inexpensive and disposable pans transcend socio-economic class, passing through every home at some point in time; but Wurtz has transformed the ordinary into something collectible. For The Aldrich, Wurtz will cover three walls of the Leir Gallery, salon style, with his pan paintings and showcase selections from his own collection of functional items commonly found in middle/upper-middle-class households—cut glass, steel/enamel, and stoneware. In doing so, Wurtz offers up a compelling dialogue about high art, decorative art, form and function, as well as the act of collecting. Curated by Amy Smith-Stewart.
The Aldrich Museum is located at 258 Main Street in Ridgefield.