“Fragile Force”
Hours: 11am–6pm, Wednesday–Saturday
and by appointment
Press Release
We are pleased to present a group exhibition featuring work by Jean Blackburn, Dawn Clements, Brian Conley, Hugo Crosthwaite, Sermin Kardestuncer, Darina Karpov, Mark Lombardi, John O’Connor, Roxy Paine, Shannon Plumb, Tavares Strachan, Lynn Talbot, Christophe Thompson, and Daniel Zeller.
Things that appear strong and full of force may in fact be delicate and fragile. Conversely, things that appear fragile may have high resilience, strength, and force. The title of this exhibition was inspired by a conversation with artist Christophe Thompson about his recent work. The work is a sword, a powerful weapon, however Thompson has crafted his blade of glass, a highly fragile material.
In her sculptures, Jean Blackburn cuts away at solid structures, sometimes paring them back to airy ghosts of their former selves, as in “Slugger” a baseball bat perforated with multiple holes drilled through and through the wood rendering it a fragile shadow of its original forceful form. In “Labyrinth” she cobbles together fragments of found picture frames into a whole stronger than any of its individual elements.
Nadja Bournonville is a photographer who creates delicate temporal inventions, then photographs the resulting fragile sculpture, barely holding together, transforming it into an enduring / permanent image.
Words and language are among the most fragile and ephemeral of forms—simple letters and sounds, meanings at times clear and others vague—but words can be among the most powerful of forces. In John O’Connor’s “A Good Idea” he carves language from influential historical speeches and texts, such as Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech and others to create a delicate spider-like drawing. Likewise, Mark Lombardi draws on intensive research to delineate constellation-like data points revealing webs of inter-connections between powerful actors and entities. In Brian Conley’s “Decipherment of Linear X”’s clay tablets and photographs he documents the results of small insects burrowing into sticks creating markings that appear similar to the proto-language Linear B.