Fuse Works presents: Alarums and Excursions
June 3 - June 26, 2011
Opening Reception Friday June 3, 2011, 7-9pm
With a brief reading by James Leonard
An exhibition of multiples and prints including: Gregory Curry, Glen Einbinder, Ross Racine, Chuck Jones, Jody Hanson, Luca Bertolo, Andrew MacDonald, James Leonard, Celeste Fichter, Peter Feigenbaum, David Shapiro, Jan Obornik, Chiara Camoni, John O. Smith, Julia Whitney Barnes, Rik de Boe, Lotte Lindner and Till Steinbrenner, Sarah Vogwill, George Spencer, Emily Roz and Cammi Climaco, Cadence Giersbach, Serge Onnen and Seldon Yuan.
Alarums and Excursions is the sixth exhibition of multiples and prints by Fuse Works, an organization dedicated to exhibiting and promoting editioned artwork. The exhibition presents new work by 21 artist comprising prints, multiples, books, and digital works.
Alarums and Excursions follows quick on the heels of the recent survey show of the last four years of Fuse Works (2007-2011) which took place at Central Connecticut State University in April. This latest exhibition presents a selection of new work as well as a few projects which, by their very nature, unfold over time and reward periodic viewings as they develop.
One such project is John O. Smith's series of artist's books "Currency Exchange". For Vol. I, Smith bound 48 one dollar bills into a handsome hardbound book in an edition of 10. The book sold for $100 and the edition quickly sold out. The proceeds funded Vol. 2 composed of 48 bound two dollar bills—at $250, this volume also sold out. For the current exhibition Smith presents Vol. 5, with it's handsome off-center portrait of Abraham Lincoln on the 5 dollar bill. Smith intends to bind all of the denominations of US currency.
Glen Einbinder presents his full edition of Dreamcards, Science Times, 2000. Dreamcards is a set of 52 printed cards with collage elements. Each card is based on a news story that ran in the Science Times section of the New York Times in the year 2000—one card for each week of the year. They are Einbinder's interpretations and personal reflections on the news, incorporating ideas from dreambooks which connect dream imagery with numerology and mysticism. The series was begun in 2007 and was completed earlier this year. Fuse Works is pleased to be the first to show the full edition.
Gregory Curry has created a wall sculpture out of bicycle parts and heavy duty rubber gloves. The result is as much simulated hunting trophy as it is a take on the work of Picasso.
Artist, prankster Chuck Jones offers two editions for Alarums and Excursions. The first is a simple rubber stamp produced by an online service. It reads: If I've been to your house, I've peed in your sink. Another edition is a mail art project in the form of an elaborate prank. Jones offers to mail a package to any innocent victim the purchaser specifies. The package contains a letter, photographs and a CD that leads them to believe that a group of itinerant musicians are coming to their home.
Luca Bertolo has exhibited books and folios of prints with Fuse Works over in its previous four years. For this exhibition Bertolo has produced a woodblock print portrait of the great Russian poet Daniil Kharms printed on an inverted page of the art magazine Mousse.
For the second year James Leonard presents a mail art project for a Fuse Works exhibition. His latest is entitled un-Suicide Note is a five page hand-written note, a long and detailed meditation on the philosophy of continued existence. The letter is an "iterated edition"—each copy transcribed from the previous one, permitting variations in format and errors and corrections to work their way through the entire edition.
David Shapiro creates understated multiples cast in bronze. His editions of realistic looking pistachio nuts and bronzed cigarette butts have drawn double takes in previous Fuse Works exhibitions. For the current exhibition Shapiro presents a single bronze potato.
Chiara Camoni's work combines a poetic conceptualism that explores time and the natural world with the acute elegance of a minimalist. Previously for Fuse Works she sold the 10 days excised from the calendar by Pope Gregory in 1582. For the current exhibition she uses a mineral with surprising properties, ulexite, to simultaneously obscure and illuminate a simple phrase.
Sarah Vogwill's recent prints tease a frenetic abstraction out of girlie magazine centerfolds. For this exhibition she has used as a starting point the iconic December 1953 Playboy magazine cover of Marilyn Monroe. But coupled with this modified portrait of the oft fetishized sex symbol, Vogwill has added an even more intimate portrait. Bound in a Playboy magazine sized softcover book are the FBI's complete files on Monroe obtained thanks to the Freedom of Information Act.
Emily Roz and Cammi Climaco collaborated on a series of small prints on paper that pair Roz's gory, vivid images of carnivores and scavengers eviscerating bloody cadavers with Climaco's wry observations as captions in handsome letterpress. The debut print, "I Can't Stop", from the series will be shown in this exhibition.
Ross Racine's West Concentric Estates is his second small print made for Fuse Works. These digital drawings appear to be aerial photographs of planned communities, in fact there are no photographs or scanned material used. The images, drawn freehand in the computer, seek to expose conflicts between constructed landscapes, the human transformation of nature and our domestic ideals.
Jody Hanson's fascination with the science of light, time and motion inform her multiple Private Rainbow, a palm-sized slide viewer and slide. The actual appearance of a rainbow depends upon the refraction of light relative to the viewer's position, rendering each rainbow sighting unique to its viewer. Private Rainbow allows us to pocket that elusive joy.
Andrew McDonald's small knitted sculptures from the series "Little Wonders" provoke associations with children's toys, sweaters and tea cozy's—they are at once all and none of these—removed from the domestic tactile realm to the visual realm of wall sculpture. McDonald's work re-configures everyday materials and manufacturing processes, and in this group of multiples also plays with our notions of the production line as each one is not an exact duplicate of the one before it.
Peter Feigenbaum's Vacant Tile is his third multiple for Fuse Works and an extension of his ongoing "Trainset Ghetto" project. "Trainset Ghetto" is a series in which Feigenbaum creates physical landscapes on trainset scale in order to photograph them. His blighted cityscapes are brilliantly generic, and almost capable of triggering false memories of 1970s New York. Plucked from his fabricated realities, Vacant Vacant Tile is a simulacrum of a urban vacant lot created on a 6 x 6 ceramic tile.
Settlement (house), Jan Obornik's new multiple places a web-like tangle of welded metal inside a quintessential house form. The multiple seems to express a chaotic restlessness within the desire for the domestic comfort of homogeneity, or perhaps something even more sinister.
Lotte Lindner & Till Steinbrenner's photograph, If, of an MTA poster shows a brownpaper wrapped parcel, the dust and grit on its Plexiglas covering and the reflection of the subway car it is on. The poster, which is familiar to most New Yorkers, comes from the MTA anti-terrorism campaign "If you see something, say something." Lindner and Steinbrenner's spatially disorienting reproduction derails the already conflicted PR sentiment of the slogan with a meditation on the complexities and ambiguities of the act of seeing. Lindner and Steinbrenner will also show Instant Prayer, a set of three palm sized sound devices which, when activated, play a sound recording of a Muezzin calling, a Rabbi singing, or the Pope blessing.
George Spencer brings us Ghost Phone, a pair of cellphones of black plastic and gold leaf mounted on a simple base— an homage to Jasper John's seminal multiple Painted Bronze (Ballantine Ale) of 1960.
Celeste Fichter is one of Fuse Works most prolific contributors with work ranging from video, to work on paper to multiples. Her work treads a beautiful line between humorous and poignant. Screensavers is a set of images meant to be used as screensavers, the images are literally screens (computer monitors) in various acts of being saved; from destruction to salvation.
The book Testbeelden (test images) was compiled by Rik De Boe with drawings and pictures out of his family album. He asked Johan De Wilde and Wouters Coolens for a reaction. Johan De Wilde wrote a letter. Wouter Coolens inserted newspaper cuttings all over the book, as picture-letters.
Julia Whitney Barnes has slipcast organic vessel forms to drink out of with the words in small script 'eat me, drink me' on the inside and on the outside glazed fungi forms.
Substantially more than simple performance documentation, Serge Onnen's DVD and book Obromanie knits together haunting images from performances in which the band Oorbeek plays inside a giant shadow puppet theater constructed using a gazebo in an Amsterdam park. The accompanying booklet with stills from the DVD was made on a vintage color mimeograph machine.
Seldon Yuan's Thinking of You is deliberately vague (self) portrait of both artist and viewer. A coarse halftone image of the artist partially obscures and reveals a mirror beneath. Standing in front of the mirror one is able to see a reflection of oneself in the mirror woven into the image of the artist.
Known for her vertiginous, large-scale murals of room interiors, Cadence Giersbach has produced smaller versions in three colors as easy-to-transfer wall decals. Giersbach isolated and manipulated three views of the empty set of Hitchcock's classic 1954 suspense thriller, Dial M for Murder.
