leave no trace: ridges, troughs and phantom limbs

Archive

October 02, 2009 - October 04, 2009

Artists: Steven Baldi, Christian Capurro (ISCP), Tyler Coburn, Angelina Gualdoni (ISCP), Alex Hubbard, Charles Mayton, Raha Raissnia, Carissa Rodriguez, Carlos Roque (ISCP), Pieter Schoolwerth

Curated by Margaret Clinton

Isoclinal folds have undergone greater stress that has compressed the limbs of the folds tightly together. The limbs of overturned folds dip in the same direction, indicating that the upper part of the fold has overridden the lower part. Depending on where the exposure is in an overturned fold, the oldest strata might actually be on top of the sequence and be misinterpreted as the youngest rock unit.

CliffsNotes.com. Folding. August 28, 2009

I believe there are forms to be found within the activity of making as much as within the end products. These are forms of behavior aimed at testing the limits and possibilities involved in that particular interaction between one’s actions and the materials of the environment. This amounts to the submerged side of the art iceberg.

Robert Morris, “Some Notes on the Phenomenology of Making”, Artforum, 1970

If we were to apply the metaphor of geological accumulation to the history of art, we could quickly establish that the production of new works is grounded upon materials, styles and concepts from previous historical periods. We could also cite examples of works that willfully forefront a historical stratum by bringing it back into the fold. Both procedures seem obvious if not teleological. What is less obvious is how the old material is translated and then interpreted within its new context or guise.

Certain works of art expose their constitutive process when noticeable marks belie a set of actions. As with any palimpsest, accumulated layers of discrete material operations serve as the subcutaneous foundation for what appears initially to be a flat plane. In other works, we may (or may not) discover that several stages of phenomena have been occluded purposefully. As would be the case with a rockslide, it is precisely in the missing evidence or physical displacement, that we sense a set of phantom movements that are no longer visible.

This particular grouping of works invites us to extend geological metaphors of material memory so that we may mine a spectrum of artworks that annunciate or avoid accumulation, that provide a record of erasure or the surfacing acts of de-sublimation. The ISCP galleries, one newly- built, both rapidly transformed, also remind us that content, materials and their attendant interpretations may shift suddenly, in short bursts of time.

This exhibition is made possible by the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs.