WATER MILL, NY.- Artist Josephine Meckseper will respond to the
Parrish Art Museums architecture and collection with sculptural works installed in the outdoor gallery, lobby, and permanent collection galleries. Opening July 4 and continuing through October 14, 2013, Mecksepers installation is the second iteration of Parrish Platform, an experimental series of artist-driven projects.
Organized by Curator of Special Projects Andrea Grover, Platforms ongoing projects consider the entire Museum as a potential canvas for works that transcend disciplinary boundaries. According to Grover, Twice a year, a new artist or collective will be invited to respond to and activate the myriad spaces and grounds of the Museum, from the corridors to the café to the covered porches and terraces, encouraging new ways to experience art, architecture, the landscape, and the Museums building.
Josephine Meckseper is known for her film, photography, and installations, which conflate art objects with commodities. Blending materials and signifiers from the worlds of advertising, retail, and visual art, Meckseper calls into question the relationship of power to cultural influence. My works in themselves are referring to display platforms to create a critical dialogue about our consumer society, Meckseper has said. By employing shelves, window displays, mirrored platforms, and retail slatwalls as a literal platform to display objects and images, my installations question the paradox inherent in manic consumption and advertising language.
Meckseper will be the first artist to use the outdoor gallery space. Approaching the main entrance, visitors will encounter two glass vitrines in the exterior space that relate to the architecture and geometry of the Museum. Inside, in the main lobby, a large mirrored sculptural installation will create a visual axis between the indoor and outdoor works visible through the main lobbys windows. The lobby piece, Sabotage on Auto Assembly Line to Slow it Down (2009), consists of a mirrored display featuring a sculpture of car tires on a chrome conveyer belt and two videos presented on stacked monitors. The installation will reflect the passing traffic on Montauk Highway, visible through the south window wall of the lobby.
The slatwall work Crow (2011) will be installed next to John Chamberlains sculpture Tambourinefrappe (2010) in the Look and Look Again gallery. (Slatwall panels are common fixtures used to display almost any type of merchandise.) According to Meckseper, The juxtaposition of Chamberlains smashed car sculpture with the Jeep logo and mens neckties on canvas bring to mind the local car dealerships not far from the Museum. The eight-by-eight foot slatwall pieces deliberately reference the work of Minimalists Donald Judd and Dan Flavin as well as Minimalisms rejection of Abstract Expressionism.
Corvette (2011), a second slatwall piece, will be installed in the Collective Conversations gallery, sharing the space with works by Willem de Kooning, Dan Flavin, and Keith Sonnier. The red, white, and blue color scheme relates to de Koonings painting Untitled XXXVIII (1983) while Flavins fluorescent light installation (1963) and Sonniers neon (2004) are reflected in the mirrored slatwall and echoed in the fluorescent tubes centered beneath Corvette.
Josephine Meckseper was born in Lilienthal, Germany, and studied at Hochschule der Künste in Berlin and CalArts, Los Angeles, where she received her MFA. Mecksepers Manhattan Oil Project, commissioned by the Art Production Fund, was installed in a lot adjacent to Times Square in 2012. Her work has been exhibited worldwide, and is in the permanent collections of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, The Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Brooklyn Museum, migros museum für gegenwartskunst, Zürich, and the Hammer Museum, UCLA. Meckseper lives in New York, NY and Amagansett, NY.