Exhibition

Frottage. Alta Buden / Juliana Cerqueira Leite / Roarke Menzies / Bai Ye

27 May 2016 – 26 Jun 2016

Save Event: Frottage. Alta Buden / Juliana Cerqueira Leite / Roarke Menzies / Bai Ye

I've seen this

People who have saved this event:

close

OUTLET Fine Art is pleased to present an exhibition of new work by four artists: Alta Buden, Juliana Cerqueira Leite, Roarke Menzies and Bai Ye.

About

Working with performative plaster sculpture, fabric Cyanotype, glass, photography, wallpaper and sound, this grouping of emerging artists is absorbing and responding to impulses in their environment; the figurative and natural reference points lead to primal transcriptions of data that are filtered via digital and sculptural processes. Among its countless meanings, Frottage involves a visual and audible transfer of information from one dimension into new formations.

Alta Buden’s series of hand blown glass sculptures and sun-prints are inspired by her exploration of the environment, in particular the bodies of water surrounding the Metropolitan landscape of New York City. She creates the work onsite at beaches and on riverbanks, where land touches water, using the rich landscape of rocks and other natural forms as a visual source. Some of these works take the form of amorphous cast concrete vessels, hand blown glass shapes that contain water and large scale fabrics with the cyanotype photographic process. Each piece becomes a vessel of sorts, holding the biological and geological forms from these places. This process of “recording” the environment captures memories, data and history present in the ever-shifting and evolving landscape.

Juliana Cerqueira Leite’s primary instrument is her body: whether she is creating a photograph, ceramic object, drawing or plaster form, her body serves as the starting point of the work. Nudity serves the practical function of an imprinting mechanism, as well as lending itself to the aesthetic of the material. The work in this exhibition is created onsite using plaster over a light framework and emphasizes the power of the human form moving through time and space; the resulting plaster sculpture will freeze stages of her movement as she climbs the wall. There is a certain lightness due to the absence of the figure and appears to be suspended in space. There is a tension between constraint and control, presence and absence, which is underscored by the time sensitive nature of the plaster medium. Cerqueira Leite’s performance sculptures also reference the physicality and sexuality investigated in the early feminist art by artists such as Ana Mendieta.

Roarke Menzies’ installation Permeate/Permutate is a solo sound performance that incorporates voice, audio effects units, live sampling, and a site-specific microphone/speaker array to imagine new configurations of anatomy, machinery, agency and space. In this work, the audio signal chain operates to extend the expressive and performative, as well as the accidental and incomprehensible gestures of the body. Wet, breathy, sometimes microscopic sounds are amplified, expanded, contorted and multiplied. These extended bodily sounds, mutations of their fleshy origins, are then sent out into specifically placed sound exciters, where they engage the architectural attributes of the OUTLET exhibition space, activating its surfaces, cavities and hidden material conditions. The sound traces are then returned to the 'central nervous system' of the mixing board, via contact microphones, before being sent back into the performer's mouth using a Talk Box, where mutated fragments of a 'disembodied voice' are heard.

Bai Ye’s photos are made with his mobile phone and a flashlight in abandoned buildings or on the low lit city streets of Xi’an. These alien landscapes and anonymous figures are imbued with the hope of transcendence in the digital transformation from their original state. His imagery is enigmatic yet sometimes contain a clue to the inherent meaning of the image. The viewer can discover an occasional reference point about the original objects: a cigarette butt, a stone, a strand of barbed wire, the moon, or clouds. For the installation at OUTLET, he has created a digitized wallpaper representing the shape and design of a traditional Chinese envelope that will serve as the back drop for his hauntingly beautiful and poetic photographs.

CuratorsToggle

John Silvis

Comments

Have you been to this event? Share your insights and give it a review below.