The Exhibitions Program at Art House, in cooperation with The Dorado Project, proudly presents Ecco Domus from May 13 to June 26, 2016. Guest curator Enrico Gomez presents a selection of artworks from nine local, national, and international artists; Abdolreza Aminlari, Joy Curtis, Katherine Di Turi, Karl England, Emily Hass, Teresa Moro, Jeremy Coleman Smith, Kirk Amaral Snow, and Krista Svalbonas, engaging themes of replication, recombination, and repetition as found within the framework of architectural inspiration.
OPENING RECEPTION: Friday, May 13, 2016, 6:00 to 9:00pm (sneak preview 5-6pm)
Krista Svalbonas, Migrants 22, 2014, pigment print and collage on board, 14 x 14"
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
contact: Raymond E. Mingst 201-659-5771 or gallery@arthouseproductions.org
The Exhibitions Program at Art House, in cooperation with The Dorado Project, is pleased to present
ECCO DOMUS
May 13 to June 26, 2016
The Exhibitions Program at Art House, in cooperation with The Dorado Project, proudly presents Ecco Domus from May 13 to June 26, 2016. Guest curator Enrico Gomez presents a selection of artworks from nine local, national, and international artists; Abdolreza Aminlari, Joy Curtis, Katherine Di Turi, Karl England, Emily Hass, Teresa Moro, Jeremy Coleman Smith, Kirk Amaral Snow, and Krista Svalbonas, engaging themes of replication, recombination, and repetition as found within the framework of architectural inspiration.
Listing Info:
EXHIBITION: Ecco Domus
OPENING RECEPTION: Friday, May 13, 2016, 6:00 to 9:00pm
DATES: May 13 to June 26, 2016
LOCATION: Art House, 136 Magnolia Avenue, Jersey City, NJ 07306 (PATH Train to Journal Square, exit mezzanine level at Summit Avenue)
REGULAR HOURS: Tuesdays to Fridays, 4:30pm to 7:30pm; Sundays, noon to 3:00pm
COST: Free
MORE INFO: 201-659-5771, www.arthouseproductions.org [e] gallery@arthouseproductions.org
The Artists: Abdolreza Aminlari * Joy Curtis * Katherine Di Turi * Karl England * Emily Hass * Teresa Moro * Jeremy Coleman Smith * Kirk Amaral Snow * Krista Svalbonas
Curatorial Statement:
The exhibition title Ecco Domus combines the Middle English spelling of the word "echo" with the Latin word for "house", referring to the exhibiting artists proclivity for riffing, amalgamation and homage with regard to architectural interest, be it in vernacular scaffolding, modernist structure, or interior design. The Middle English and Latin source points of the title also nod to the origins of western language itself, metaphorically linking the etymological roots of communication with the foundations of the structures examined here. Though each of these artists have highly specialized and individual aims that in many ways span and exceed the thematic parameters proposed in the show, they all share an interest in and usage of "the built environment" somewhere within the development of their own aesthetic constructions.
Western art and Western architecture, positioned with sibling orientation and in similar dynamic, have been mutually influential from antiquity. Ancient Egyptian and Greco-Roman edifices, like the sculpture and painting of the same era, reflect and elucidate the religious and civic ideals of their time. Thusly, architectural imagery made its way into pictorial art from as early as 30 B.C.E., as evidenced in the beautiful and elaborate frescos depicting ancient Roman cityscapes and domestic interiors unearthed in the Villa Boscoreale, near Naples, Italy. Other art historical treasures featuring architectural representation would include Jan van Eyck's "The Anolfini Portrait", "The Annunciation" by Fra Angelico, and Johannes Vermeer's atmospheric interior and figure study, "Young Woman with a Water Pitcher". The architectural interior as a subject found later champions in Matisse, Vuillard and more comparatively recently in the works of Hockney, Hopper, and Wyeth.
With advances in the craft and stability of building materials giving rise to adventurous new forms and more ambitious urban planning, so to have changes in the development of towns and cities influenced and shaped the way artists construct and reflect their own realities, filtered through the inspirations and artistic concerns of their day. Trace the Modernist love notes of O'Keefe and Stieglitz to the Radiator Building and the Flatiron Building respectively through to the Precisionist paintings of Demuth and
Sheeler, landing finally at the seminal interventions of Gordon Matta-Clark, wherein buildings themselves are carved into and cut apart to create the "anarchitectural" material of this artists making.
In Ecco Domus the exhibiting artists continue this fine and storied tradition of responding to the built environment, in considered and deeply personal ways. The show offers works that engage the viewer within three primary areas of architectural subject: the interior, the exterior, and the structural. These primary concerns combine with the multi-tiered interests of each artist in collectively simpatico yet individually unique through-lines corresponding, of course, to subjective aesthetic and material choices.
Artist Abdolreza Aminlari's photographs of light on exterior walls takes a quintessential photographic subject (light) and reduces it to its primary essence. These works allude to Minimalism, the "white cube" of the gallery, and the artists own predilection for negative space. This constructed play between exterior/interior, positive/negative, and subject/object is key to accessing one of many passageways into this artists undertaking.
Brooklyn-based sculptor Joy Curtis casts and re-casts forms from commercial interiors (cornices and molding) appropriating easily overlooked architectural features and reframing them in a context rife with chance and intuition as much as planning and design. The relationship of the constructed surround to human is flipped from that which shelters and facilitates to an expression which confronts, commanding attention and directing movement around rather than within.
The photographic works of Caracas/London-based Katherine Di Turi blur the lines between cultural artifact, commodity, and documentation. In her Giltwood Mirrors Series, Di Turi juxtaposes found auction house catalogue images of antique mirrors to an actual mirror, and documents the image once more. Here reflection and repetition obfuscates the demarcations between original and copy, drawing questions on art as gesture, on the tangible and intangible worth of art as object, and on the fun-house vicissitudes of an impressionable secondary art market.
The art practice of London-based Karl England, in one particular body of work, centers around copies of copies of an original drawing of an architectural element (a desk/drafting table). Though his original visual rumination has long since passed from primary consideration, like a game of "Telephone", the particulars of this story morph through multiple retellings. England reconfigures and embellishes/reduces his visual subject matter from memory, foregrounding questions regarding the structural integrity of recall, design and intention.
New York-based artist Emily Hass engages history, materiality and the impermanence of memory within her Exiles series, a body of work utilizing and reconfiguring "archival architectural plans of Berlin buildings owned and occupied by Jews and other persecuted artists and intellectuals of the 1930's." With gouache and found vintage paper, Hass renders abstract segments of larger building plans, alluding perhaps to the often contrary relationship between implied architectural stability and longevity and transient human ideas of belonging and place.
Madrid-based artist Teresa Moro focuses on the incidental, found still-life arrangements of furniture in temporal, human-made environments; waiting rooms, museum lobbies, art fair booths. In focusing on the design elements of these "clonal" backdrops, the artist frames the absent body and its attendant accouterments as a locus for the exchange of culture, commodity, service, and experience. These ongoing series cull the "mise en scene" of differing locations, refuting value-based notions of exclusivity and uniqueness.
With regard to architecture, Jersey City-based artist Jeremy Coleman Smith takes homage and reproduction to its logical and encompassing end. Using the ephemeral materials of our cast away society; corrugated cardboard, paper, tape and foam, Smith replicates objects of the domestic interior in painstaking detail highlighting the contradictions between notions of artisanal craft and provisional packaging, sentimental heirloom and ergonomic utility. Bringing his background as a cabinetmaker to his fine art practice, Smith focuses our attention on the minutia of detail and aestheticism underlying and evident in our everyday surround.
Kirk Amaral Snow, a Baltimore-based artist, offers a few selections from his ongoing series which takes vernacular architecture as its inspirational starting point, reflecting and reframing the design and aesthetics of the functional, the local and the performative aspects within systems of support. With a decidedly minimalist slant, Snow inverts the networks of infrastructure and exposes the inherent poetry in building skeletal underpinnings. His work revels in the paradoxical relationship between purpose and time, highlighting the successes and failures of intention divorced or tweaked from original context.
Chicago-based artist Krista Svalbonas has a practice that incorporates a wide variety of media, including photography, painting and installation. Svalbonas' work visually conflates disparate architectural forms; barn sidings with high-rises, or forgotten housing plans of yesteryear with current dwelling developments. These iconic geometric forms read part letterform character and part records of intention and formal aspiration. Floating, enigmatic and engaging, these shapes signify something decidedly less
stoic and sedentary than their original designs, perhaps the tension between the idealized promise and mortal challenge extant in any human edifice.
One would be hard-pressed to find an area of concern, outside the necessities of food, recreation, and personal artistic development, that occupies the minds of artists more than that of space, specifically the acquisition of space within which to create. From the fluctuating inventories of affordable studio space to the uncertain availability and openness of galleries within which to show ones work, the changing dynamics of the real estate and economic markets have made a great impact on artists and
the scale and pace with which they can create. The real estate product, mainly architectural buildings and the partitioned rooms therein, is a ubiquitous context for most people in modern urban centers, and equally so for creatives. Sudden and unexpected changes to this context, for example the devastating real estate crash of 2008, can affect the art market and artists in myriad ways from lost art sales to gallery closures and more. Interestingly, the word economy comes from the Greek oikos, meaning house, implying a symbiotic relationship of interdependence and exchange for all bodies under a common ceiling. The interrelationship between the seemingly disparate fields of politics, science and money affect the fields of art and architecture in related ways, and this has been true from the very beginnings of Western culture.
Whether looking to the designs of the past, or highlighting the oft-missed sublimity of the architectural present, the artists in Ecco Domus repeat, riff and utilize these inspirations as actual material; framing and crafting new structures, breaking down the masonry divides between the known present and unknown future limits of what these forms might ultimately convey.
- Enrico Gomez, curator
About Art House
Art House Productions, Inc. is a not-for-profit 501(c)(3) organization founded in late September 2001 by writer and actress Christine Goodman. Art House began as informal gathering of poets and community members in direct response to the tragedies of September 11th. At that time, there were no consistent performance venues for artists in Jersey City to meet one another and share new work. Art House's inaugural event sprung from the desire to connect a devastated community through art and dialogue.
Art House Productions has grown since its inception and has significantly influenced the advancement of the arts community, acting as one of the major pioneering forces for the arts in Jersey City. This expansion of activity and programming necessitated internal growth as well, and in 2007 Art House Productions became incorporated and filed for nonprofit 501(c)(3) status. In late 2007, the organization was presented the Key to the City and an official Proclamation for its outstanding contributions to the City of Jersey City, NJ. Art House Productions inspires, nurtures and promotes the arts in our community through accessible, multi-disciplinary initiatives.
About The Dorado Project
The Dorado Project is a New York / North New Jersey-based project space and compendium of select local, national, and international contemporary art. With a focus on emerging artists and innovative works, The Dorado Project seeks to unearth and weigh the very best of arts' rich reserves. The Dorado Project: mining art. sharing gold.
About The Curator
Enrico Gomez is an artist, curator and art critic based in the New York City area. He received his B.F.A. in Art with a concentration in Drawing from Arizona State University and has exhibited at various venues including Visual Arts Center of New Jersey, Summit, NJ, The Painting Center, New York, NY, Odetta Gallery, Brooklyn NY, Pop Up Art Shop Baranquilla, CO, Van der Plas Gallery, New York, NY, Pentimenti Gallery, Philadelphia, PA, The Mesa Contemporary Arts Center, Mesa, AZ, P.S.122 Gallery, New York, NY, Momenta Art, Brooklyn NY, and The Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art, New York, NY. He has been featured in various publications including The New Criterion, Hyperallergic, Art F City, The L Magazine, Brooklyn Magazine, and The New York Times. Founder and Director of The Dorado Project; an artist-run, project space & contemporary art compendium based in New York / North New Jersey, he is also the co-founder of both the former Parallel Art Space and Camel Art Space in Queens & Brooklyn respectively. The monthly art critic for WAGMAG Brooklyn Art Guide he is also a contributing writer for esse: art + opinions. In 2014 Brooklyn Magazine named him one of the 100 Most Influential People in Brooklyn Culture.
Made possible in part by funds from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts/Department of State, A Partner Agency of the National En- dowment for the Arts; administered by the Hudson County Office of Cultural & Heritage Affairs/Tourism Development, and by the County of Hudson, Thomas A. DeGise, Hudson County Executive, and the Hudson County Board of Chosen Freeholders.
For print or web-ready images please contact:
Raymond E. Mingst, 201-659-5771 or gallery@arthouseproductions.org
136 Magnolia Ave JC NJ 07306 | arthouseproductions.org | 201.915.9911