PORTLAND, OR.- Adams and Ollman is presenting a solo exhibition of new work by Stefanie Victor. For this exhibition, the artist’s second at the gallery, Victor explores gesture and form as it relates to her affective experience with domestic objects, space, time, and studio processes through six different types of works installed in subtle spatial rhythms around the gallery. In doing so, Victor investigates the capacity for discrete elements to collectively map a kind of language of private experience. The exhibition is on view through October 31.
Small in scale and carefully adapted to the gallery space, the sculptures relate to the body and its movements, as well as interior infrastructure and hardware in Victor’s apartment. Made from a range of raw materials including cement, glass, metal, and clay, their forms often belie their materiality. Rather than hard and still, they conjure the possibility of pliancy or activation. Recurring, shifting, and singular elements suggesting and disrupting pattern, reference the repetition of commonplace elements such as hinges, decorative moulding, and electrical cords. But the sculptures’ abstract qualities, unusual relationships to the wall, unexpected details, slight variations, and imperfections borne from hand-made processes shift the work away from the mechanized and familiar and towards more particular, human kinds of forms.
As in past work, Victor foregrounds intimacy and incorporates the confines of the body, studio, and home to create meaning that exists first of all in private, performed and made for no one but the artist herself. The works on view are a distillation of time spent in the studio turning, bending, moving, shaping, pushing, and folding. Accrued gestures from routine domestic movements such as closing a door, drawer or window, opening the blinds, turning on the lights, or plugging and unplugging cords, surround and find expression in her practice and this work. The sculptures quietly imply their own abstract uses, and gesture back to unseen movements as once malleable materials formed and re-formed by hands now absent.
Also on view in the small room is a series of works on paper by Victor that complements the installation.
Stefanie Victor was born in 1982 and lives and works in Queens, New York. She earned a MFA in Painting from Yale School of Art in 2009, and a BFA in Printmaking from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2004. Her work has been included in exhibitions at MoMA PS1, New York; Participant, Inc, New York; and the Drawing Center, New York, among others.
