Month: March 2010

Ben Woodeson

braskartblog

The Tank Room is pleased to announce that their next exhibition will be a solo presentation by London artist Ben Woodeson, known for his “deliberately dangerous” installations and sculptures. Woodeson will be installing “Health & Safety Violation #19 – Super Scary Spinning Thing” a work that challenges both the exhibiting institution and the viewer.

Hard hats and eye protection will be provided and must be worn.

How far will you go?

Primarily using basic technologies Woodeson makes energetic sculptures; frequently they are reactive, not in the usual push this, pull that sense, rather their physical activity instigates a more intense and visceral relationship with the viewer and institution. In most cases the sculptures are unaware of the presence of the viewer, the works don’t care if they (the viewer) are there or not, their control systems are automatic and random. The sculptures aim to affect their environment by modifying it, whether through physical motion, temperature changes, subverting information and/or sense of security.

Since the start of 2009 Woodeson has been making and exhibiting the Health & Safety Violation Series of deliberately dangerous sculptures; to date these have included 33,000 ball bearings on the floor, automatic trip wires, suffocation devices, electric fences, spinning metal weights, twisting ropes and steel garroting cables.

Woodeson studied at Chelsea College of Art and Design and Glasgow School of Art. He has exhibited throughout the UK, Europe and the USA. He is based in Hackney, London and teaches at Central St Martins.

The Tank Room gallery is an initiative of the Art Department of St. Saviours & St. Olaves School a science specialist school in the Bermondsey area of London. For further information please contact:

Woodeson

Spacestudios

Wayne Gonzales

EMAILGON

Stephen Friedman Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of new work by American painter Wayne Gonzales.

Returning to the gallery for his second solo exhibition, Gonzales presents an innovative group of new paintings composed of both abstract and figurative work. Contemplative, evocative and mysterious, the work uses a rigorous formal structure to mine the processes of painting and perception. With this new body of work the artist draws parallels between the figurative and the abstract and suggests that the distinction may not be so fixed and rigid. Rather, the artist proposes two manifestations of the same reality, two parts of the same, larger whole.

Like Gonzales’s earlier crowd scenes, the figurative paintings are based on anonymous source photographs. However, the mood has now shifted; here, the crowds are thinner and the brushstrokes are looser and more urgent. The palette of earthy browns and the soft focus give the sense of peering through a cloud of dust or smoke. The works play with scale to great effect; from afar, an image crystallises and can be viewed as a whole. However, up close, the figures break down into painterly brushstrokes and small gestures.

The abstract works also engage with the idea of scale, albeit to different effect. Following a consistent and repeated structure, each painting is determined by a grid of white orbs surrounded by concentric bands that become darker in graduating tones of grey through to black. Appearing to hover inside the canvas, the bright white orbs float on the ground, almost glowing, or become more pronounced, the distinct rings crisp and clear, depending on viewing distance. The technique is mechanised and devoid of gesture. We are left with light and its absence.

Gonzales’s grid compositions are tightly structured, but the effect on the viewer’s eye is a highly fluid and evocative visual experience that differs from viewer to viewer. This effect calls to mind the blinding spotlights on a film set, threatening searchlights roaming the streets, or the sun’s after-image on the back of your eyelids. From up close the concentric striations may recall images of sound waves or topographical maps. A stark white glow can evoke the sense of a godly presence, or the moment before passing into the afterlife.

The work in the exhibition moves between two states, shifting from solid material being into a ghostly intangibility, and back again. In fact, it relies on the viewer to initiate this movement and to imbue it with meaning. Refuting any tangible reading, the artist asks us to interpret our own response to these mute but highly charged images.

Wayne Gonzales (b. 1957, New Orleans) lives and works in New York City. Recent solo exhibitions include: Paula Cooper Gallery, New York (2009); Seomi Gallery, Seoul (2008) and Patrick de Brock Gallery, Knokke, Belgium (2008). Recent group exhibitions include: Every Revolution is a Roll of the Dice, curated by Bob Nickas, Paula Cooper Gallery, New York (2009); Reflections, Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago (2008); Say Goodbye to…, The Clifford Gallery at Colgate University, Hamilton NY (2009); Empires and Environments, The Rose Art Museum, Waltham MA (2008).

Stephen Friedman Gallery