FIGURING / GROUNDING
STACKS Projects Directors Show
23 November - 11 December 2016
Opening Night - Wednesday 23 November 6-8pm
Exhibtion Image Credit: Document Photography
This Director’s Show at STACKS Projects engages with various notions of the becoming figure in relation to multiple and shifting grounds. In adopting this figure/ground model, I suggest that the works expand and problematise this modernist art trope and generate active fields of figuring and grounding, in which the object of knowledge and the matter from which it is made are mutually constituted. Both figure and ground are caught up in an active, unfolding and becoming relation. Kaya Clarkson and Ioulia Terizis both use photography and a two-dimensional format, but each interrogate their relationship to the histories they emerge from. Further, they suggest new ways of thinking about the picture plane, the process of making work, and the artwork’s physical status in the world. In the work of Joanne Makas and Amber Hearn, installation plays a critical role, as they negotiate new relations of the figure to the less stable grounds of memory and our phenomenological experience of the world. This exhibition aims to generate resonances between these four emerging artists works and hopefully propose new questions regarding the interaction of artwork and world.
Meredith Birrell, curator
STACKS Projects is barely two years old and this is only the second Director’s Show. If you sniff deeply when you walk into the space, you may perhaps get a lingering waft of that irresistible fresh newborn smell. There is much that is exciting, new and experimental. This STACKS baby is at that wonderful stage of life: fresh, enthusiastic, full of promise and hope, perhaps clumsy and experimental and certainly deeply vulnerable and brave. It relies on it’s artistic DNA but is willing to challenge it.
Emma Kirby
