2008
Full Circle: Ten Years of Radius
November 28 , 2008 to June 7, 2009Exhibition Reception: December 14, 2008; 3 to 5 pm
This exhibition will feature work from the first ten years of Radius: Emerging Artists from Connecticut and Southeastern New York , a professional development program for regional artists, which is jointly organized by The Aldrich and the Ridgefield Guild of Artists. Curated by Regine Basha from Arthouse in Austin, Texas, the exhibition will present a selection of recent works produced by alumni of the program.
Image: Ben Weiner, The Great New Wave, 2007. Collection of Tonya and Thomas Nicholson.
Kwang-Young Chun: The Soul—Journey to America
December 14, 2008 to May 24, 2009
Exhibition Reception: December 14, 2008; 3 to 5 pm
Noted Korean artist Kwang-Young Chun makes fantastically intricate sculpture out of the recycled pages of old Korean books printed on mulberry paper. He wraps the handmade paper around Styrofoam tetrahedrons and other geometric forms that serve as the basic units of his compositions. The forms are then arranged in free-standing three-dimensional sculptures or mounted on the wall as two-dimensional low-reliefs. The artist will be producing his largest free-standing work to date—over fourteen feet high—for presentation in The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum’s Project Space. The Soul—Journey to America will travel to the University of Wyoming Art Museum following its Aldrich Debut.
Traveling Exhibition
Generously supported by
Image: Kwang-Young Chun, Aggregation 06-JN025, 2006
Video A—Harry Shearer: The Silent Echo Chamber
December 14, 2008 to February 8, 2009
Exhibition Reception: December 14, 2008; 3 to 5 pm
The Silent Echo Chamber is the newest video work by actor, musician, and satirist Harry Shearer. Presented on ten monitors, The Silent Echo Chambercaptures well-known personalities from politics and the media in the silent moments before “going live.” Individuals portrayed include James Carville, Barack Obama, Larry King, Dr. Phil, John McCain, and Chris Matthews, each caught in the uneasy prelude to becoming the familiar animated “talking head.” Shearer’s silent portrait gallery turns the familiar into the strange, allowing visitors to project their own meaning on the awkward collective silence of those to whom Americans usually look for guidance and commentary. Over his fifty-year career, Shearer has, among other things, been a writer for Saturday Night Live, a co-creator and actor in the 1984 spoof This is Spinal Tap, host of KCRW’s radio comedy and music program Le Show, and perhaps most memorably, the voice actor for over twelve characters on The Simpsons, including Mr. Burns, Waylon Smithers, and Ned Flanders.
Image: Harry Shearer, Larry King (video still from The Silent Echo Chamber), 2008
2009
Dave Cole: Flags of the World
February 14 to May 31, 2009
Exhibition Reception: March 1, 2009; 3 to 5 pm
Installed in the Museum’s lobby, Dave Cole’s work Flags of the World #3 is one of a series of American flags that the artist has painstakingly handcrafted. Each flag in the series is composed from all of the red, white, and blue found in the 192 flags of the countries that are members of the United Nations, and is accompanied by the resulting leftover fragments, displayed in an adjacent laundry basket. Carefully sewn together in the manner of a quilt, the iconic symbol is turned by Cole into an object that engenders contemplation on the character of the United States in an age of growing globalization.
Image: Dave Cole, Flags of the World (installation view), 2008
Alejandro Diaz: New Work
February 21 to June 7, 2009
Exhibition Reception: March 1, 2009; 3 to 5 pm
Alejandro Diaz uses humor to draw attention to the culturally embedded racial stereotypes with which he is familiar from his bicultural Mexican/Texan upbringing. At The Aldrich, Diaz will create a series of language-related works that further his acclaimed cardboard signs by incorporating them into sculptural elements, ultimately reversing stereotypical perceptions. For example, the artist disrupts an anthropological diorama of ingredients and tools for preparing a traditional Mexican “tortilla” by presenting a cardboard sign that states that Lupe, the cook, is on a break. Assimilated in contemporary culture, she is no longer as quiet, passive, or willing as the stereotype—or a traditional diorama—would proclaim.
Image: Alejandro Diaz, Rendering for Aldrich installation, 2008
Robert Lazzarini: Guns and Knives
February 25 to September 13, 2009
Exhibition Reception: March 1, 2009; 3 to 5 pm
Robert Lazzarini’s Guns and Knives will continue the artist's exploration of the reconfiguration of objects through the use of compound planar and sine-wave distortions. This installation will feature a series of .38 Smith and Wesson revolvers and a cluster of kitchen knives, addressing repetition of the single object and variation within the group. Lazzarini will subject the Leir Gallery walls to subtle transformations, activating not only the sculptural figures, but also the visual ground. The installation will create an immanent space, emphasizing the artist’s interest in phenomenology and physically seeing. The works become a meditation on fear and violence, contrasting reductive display with charged subject matter and its inherent rational and irrational aspects.
Image: Robert Lazzarini, Gun, 2003
Main Street Sculpture Project—Frank Poor: Enon Cemetery
February 7 to May 24, 2009
Exhibition Reception: March 1, 2009; 3 to 5 pm
Frank Poor’s memory-laden outdoor work, Enon Cemetery, is based on a graveyard in Woodstock, Georgia, the small community where the artist was born and grew up. Composed of over 20 life-size grave markers (some over 15 feet tall), each element in the installation references an actual marker in the cemetery. The patterns on each of the hand-painted plywood markers are blown-up fragments of the text found on each specific gravestone. Although the process for the artist is a very personal one (numerous relatives are interred in the cemetery), the abstraction of the text makes the work more universal, evoking the spirit of the displaced burial ground. The markers will be installed so the primary view of them is from the Museum’s Camera Obscura, with the dark and ethereal image further amplifying the sense of time’s passage inherent in the work.
Image: Frank Poor, Enon Cemetery grave markers (detail), 2008
David Taylor: Frontier/Frontera
February 14 to May 31, 2009
Exhibition Reception: March 1, 2009; 3 to 5 pm
New Mexico-based photographer David Taylor documents the complexity of the US/Mexico border, ranging from the work of patrol agents to the ancient barefoot pilgrimage up the Cristo Rey mountain that is now divided between the two countries. Taylor’s photographs differ from the complex and convoluted dynamics of the region in their beauty, clarity, and sharpness. In this exhibition, the artist explores the different notions of the frontier and the border (frontera), as understood differently by Americans and Mexicans. For Taylor, the American frontier relates to a desert that holds a utopian promise of constant renewal, whereas the Mexican notion of border is a physical limit that needs to be crossed.
Image: David Taylor, Detention Cell (with serape), NM, 2007
Type A: Barrier
June 6 to August 30, 2009
Exhibition Reception: June 21, 2009; 3 to 5 pm
The collaborative team Type A (Adam Ames and Andrew Bordwin) makes work about boundaries—real and imagined. Their new project, Barrier, presents twenty-four identical concrete sculptures in the form of “Jersey Barriers,” dividers originally designed for highway medians, but adopted after 9/11 as security barricades for public buildings. Type A’s barriers differ from the originals in that each is a perfect semi-circular curve, so six form a circle, or, put end to end, a sinuous line. The Aldrich installation will bisect the entry terrace, lobby, and inner courtyard, radically changing the flow of traffic. Barrier is a collaboration between The Aldrich, The Rose Art Museum of Brandeis University, Waltham, MA, and the Tang Teaching Museum at Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY.
Traveling Exhibition
Image: Type A, Barrier (digital rendering of 2009 Aldrich installation), 2008
Edward Tufte: Seeing Around
June 13, 2009, to January 17, 2010
Exhibition Reception: June 21, 2009; 3 to 5 pm
Edward Tufte is primarily known for his revolutionary books about the visual communication of data and information. In parallel with his writing and design career has been a growing engagement with both sculpture and landscape design. This exhibition, which will be his first major museum project, will focus on sculpture and its relation to the landscape, utilizing both the Sculpture Garden and the Museum’s Project Space Gallery. Tufte has written seven books, most recently Beautiful Evidence, which received Business Week’s award as Best Innovation and Design Book for 2006. He is Professor Emeritus at Yale University, where he taught courses in statistical evidence, information design, and interface design.
Image: Edward Tufte, Rocket Science, 2007
Gerard Hemsworth: New Work
June 21, 2009 to January 10, 2010
Exhibition Reception: June 21, 2009; 3 to 5 pm
The English artist Gerard Hemsworth, currently professor of Fine Art at Goldsmiths College, University of London, will mount his first solo museum exhibition in the United States at The Aldrich. The work in the exhibition of new paintings will have the familiarity of storybook pictures, but explore what he calls “the politics of representation” and consciously “reassert a reflexive relationship between art and its audience.” Central to his work is the concern that the normative values within visual language are subject to fracture by the potential of the mind to transform images. Hemsworth has exhibited extensively in South America and Europe.
Image: Gerard Hemsworth, Neighbours, 2002
Jeanne Finley and John Muse: The Slow Lapse of Days and Months
January 13 to June 2010
Exhibition Reception:
The Slow Lapse of Days and Months is a site-specific video installation by the collaborative team of Jeanne Finley and John Muse. Utilizing multi-screen video projections, the exhibition explores three profoundly different ways of keeping time, using the real working lives of three contemporary Ridgefield residents: a dog groomer, an arborist, and a guitar instructor, played off the lives of two local historical figures: a hermit from the eighteenth century named Sarah Bishop and a wandering vagrant from the nineteenth century known as ”the Leatherman.“ Finley and Muse have worked together since 1991. This will be their first major project in the northeast.
Image: Jeanne Finley and John Muse, The Vagabond Planetarium, 2008
Paying a Visit to Mary: 2008 Hall Curatorial Fellowship Exhibition
January 31 to June 2010
Exhibition Reception:
Paying a Visit to Mary comprises work by both emerging and more established artists in a broad range of media, including performance, film, painting, sculpture, and installation. The exhibition explores a significant subject in current artistic practice: personal narrative and contemporary storytelling. Constructed as a ”call and response“ between different voices, Paying a Visit to Mary forms a romantic, conceptual, and highly specific story of our time and our present human condition. The exhibition is seen as a conversation amongst the participants and the audience.The exhibition will be curated by Maxine Kopsa, from the Netherlands, the second recipient of the Hall Curatorial Fellowship.
Publication Available
Image: Emily Wardill, Sick Serena and Dregs and Wreck and Wreck, 2007
Jo Yarrington: New Work
January 16 to June 2010
Exhibition Reception:
Connecticut artist Jo Yarrington will transform the Museum’s Leir Atrium to replicate a human eye by installing floor-to-ceiling, full-color transparencies of photographs taken of the inside of her eye. Yarrington will also utilize the Museum’s only permanent fixture, the camera obscura, for the optical project.
Image: Jo Yarrington, Rendering for Aldrich installation, 2008
Tom Molloy: New Work
January 31 to June 2010
Exhibition Reception:
Tom Molloy is an Irish artist whose work engages with global events, particularly America’s place in the new world order. With economical means, the artist manipulates found materials and images to explore the multivalency of symbols. With surgical precision, Molloy operates on potent emblems to excise hidden motives and overlooked correspondences that resonate through recent history. This exhibition will include sculptures, drawings, and photographs created by the artist during the last five years, as well as a new work made especially for The Aldrich Museum’s camera obscura. The exhibition is curated by Joseph R. Wolin, an independent curator and critic in New York.
Image: Tom Molloy, Map, 2004
