Tom Burr / Andrea Zittel. concrete realities

About

Since the 1990s, Burr and Zittel have trained their attention on the built environment, addressing questions of site-specificity, subjectivity, and the body. This exhibition focuses on their ongoing projects in sites outside of art world centers, which find the artists developing distinct, but congruent methods of tackling their overlapping spatial concerns.

Andrea Zittel founded A-Z West in the California High Desert near Joshua Tree National Park in 2000 as a “life project” in which all aspects of day to day living become the site of investigation into human nature and the social construction of need. Included in the exhibition are Tellus Interdum and Single Strand Forward Motion (both 2011), which make visible the patterns of everyday routines. For Tellus Interdum, Zittel replaces the articles in an issue of her local Yucca Valley newspaper with lorem ipsum placeholder text and applies the sheets to gallery walls in a loose grid formation.

The work highlights the newspaper’s capacity to compartmentalize and routinize its ever-changing daily content. Single Strand Forward Motion extends this rumination on the ontological frameworks we inhabit. Each of Zittel’s Single Strand works is created according to a “ruleset” that then determines its defining pattern. The shapes of the works are never the same, but the rule-sets always result in visually identifiable geometries. More recent works in the exhibition include Parallel Planar Panels and Hard Carpets (both 2014) from an ongoing series that explores the subtle contextual shifts that establish a planar object’s identity and function. Put simply, panels on the floor become rugs or carpets while panels on the wall become fine art and thereby objects to be viewed, but not necessarily handled or used.