GREENSBORO, NC.- GreenHill presents Insistent Objects: Works by Young NC Sculptors, September 2 – November 6, 2016. This is the first sculpture survey organized by GreenHill in a decade, highlighting works in the round by 18 hand-picked young contemporary artists who work, teach, graduated from a MFA program or participated in an artist residency in North Carolina. “True to GreenHill’s mission of promoting and advocating for NC artists, Insistent Objects offers visitors a chance to meet 18 emerging artists under 40 years old who are producing some of the most innovative and evocative work in contemporary sculpture today,” says Laura Way, Executive Director.
Participating artists include Ivana Milojevic Beck, Casey Cook, Andy Denton, Aaron Earley, Mario Gallucci, Rachel K. Garceau, Peter Goff, Joe Grant, Paul Howe, Kamal Nassif, Benjamin S. Reid, John Seefeldt, Austin Sheppard, Meg Stein, Frankie Toan, Kevin M. Vanek, Lu Xu and Ashley York. Mediums represented include cast aluminum and clay, welded steel, carved wood, paper, fiber and wax, many exploring contrasts between hand-made and mass-produced consumer objects. Kinetic and participatory works, along with works that incorporate found objects will be on display.
“All of the sculptures in the exhibition have the power of establishing an ‘emphatic presence,’” explains Edie Carpenter, Director, Curatorial and Artistic Programs, “which engage the viewer in considering beauty as not divorced from the unruly or abject aspects of everyday life. Though certain artists in the exhibition have artistic practices that include performance, video, and studio craft, the resurgence of the object in their work is a response to what one artist has called the 'mental pressure objects exert on the subconscious’.”
Insistent Objects will shed light on sculpture as a medium that challenges and expands ways of seeing objects or understanding ideas. Many of the artists are heavily influenced by Surrealism, the 20th-century avant-garde movement in art and literature that sought to release the creative potential of the unconscious mind by the juxtaposition of irrational images. Kamal Nassif and Meg Stein created tactile works referencing Surrealism while also reflecting a post-feminist perspective. Nassif’s refined, intricately crafted works present themselves as seductive fetish objects yet deliver a message. In Divulge (2014), the red interior of a pink dish glove is visible through voids cut in the lattice work, embodying designs of traditional Arabic architecture used to segregate or conceal women. Stein’s extroverted works contain drugstore staples such as cotton balls and make-up applicators recall the beasts and chimeras that haunted Surrealist compositions—though here with a quirky, post-Anime twist. In addition, Stein will perform a witty take on living symbiotically with sculptures fabricated from domestic objects as part of 17 Days, Greensboro’s Arts & Culture Festival in The Gallery at GreenHill on September 14 at 5:30 PM.
Certain artists take a low-tech approach as in Casey Cook’s playfully monumental cardboard sculptures, one of which was inspired by a grocery list. John Seefeldt creates works focusing on familiar objects with technological interfaces not at once apparent in their design. Ordinary bottles on a ledge allow visitors to hear conversations from an adjacent gallery space, highlighting the shift in experiential understanding of human relationships in our contemporary, media-focused culture.
Ashley York questions how value is ascribed to objects in a hyper-mediatized world, thriving on “convenience, disposability and immediacy.” Her polychrome ceramic sculptures explore transitional states between digital and real spaces and refer to landscapes based on memory or found on Google Maps. Mario Gallucci’s works in the form of rocks and hanging plants have been called “counterfeit objects” and are seamlessly fabricated from digital prints on paper of photographs by the artist of everyday objects. Lu Xu’s Salt and Pepper in Time (2013), a working alarm clock filled with salt and pepper that becomes intermingled with the movement of the clock’s hands, exemplifies how the simple “adjustment” of a found object produces poetic resonance.
Several artists address the relationship between labor and the production of objects. Kevin Vanek’s cast aluminum works reproduce a sandbag and wooden pallet – objects used in the process of casting molten metal. Their burnished forms, like cast baby shoes, have the effect of memorializing these common studio supplies evoking a “poetics of materiality”. Ivana Milojevic Beck’s elegant process-oriented works in brick and wax, though non-representational evolve within a similar register by wedding the hand-made and man-made, soft and hard, transparent and opaque.
