The artists represented in Material Occupation challenge the idea that abstraction is a rarified concept that bears little relation to everyday experience. Using familiar patterns, structures, designs, and systems, these artists explore the cultural associations inherent in prosaic materials. Traditional art-making gestures are replaced by actions equated with manual labor, such as staining, pasting, bleaching, mending, stretching, taping, daubing, recycling, and tearing. Drawing on a wide range of materials and references, these artists apply a keen eye and a steady hand as they transform house paint, thread, old and newly woven fabric, industrial tape, and other ordinary materials into poetic abstract forms. The decorative, the contemplative, and the marginalized thus take precedence in work that proposes an alternative relationship to Modernist abstraction.
Artists include, Caetano de Almeida, Sarah Crowner, Josh Faught, Elana Herzog, Marietta Hoferer, Sam Moyer, Anja Schwörer, and Melissa Thorne.
Catalogue
Material Occupation
2012, softcover, 56 pages, 8 x 10 1/8, 41 color images. Includes artists Caetano de Almeida, Sarah Crowner, Josh Faught, Elana Herzog, Marietta Hoferer, Sam Moyer, Anja Schwörer, and Melissa Thorne. Essays by Corinna Ripps Schaming and Michelle Grabner.
ISBN: 9780910763424
Price: $18.00
Image credit: Sarah Crowner, Untitled, 2011, gouache on sewn canvas, diptych: each panel 58 x 36 inches, image courtesy of the artist