Finding Form

Finding Form is a group show of historical and contemporary art and design that examines transformation, serendipity, time, and violence. The inspiration for the exhibition was discovering the wooden object pictured here about a year ago. Sitting on a concrete pad outside of The Contemporary, I immediately recognized it as "an Erik Levine." Levine is a New York based artist whose finely crafted wooden sculptures (elegantly shaped and animated by repeated strokes of wood filler) were widely recognized in the late 1980s, discussed in the context of similarly formal manipulations by sculptors including Tony Cragg, Richard Deacon, and Martin Puryear. But what I saw was a vulnerable relic, weathered to the point of near collapse, and housing a handful of spiders.

After contacting Erik and asking his permission to build a show including this "destroyed" work titled Drum from 1988, I set out to find other things whose physical or psychological state was the product of transition, stress, or chance. The framed work in the background here is a Philip Guston lithograph of suggestive forms from 1966, an exquisite example of the middle ground between the artist's Abstract Expressionist past and what would emerge a few years later as outrageous cartoon imagery of hooded figures, shoes, light bulbs, paintbrushes, and clocks.

The photo above shows Montreal-based Francois Morelli using his sculpture Belthead to create a lively wall drawing (this drawing emerges from a colorful work on paper made in the artist's studio). With his hand inside the grotesque head (constructed with used plastic, leather, and cloth belts), he holds a brush pen that emerges from the mouth and draws elegant lines that picture looping linked belts and other belt heads. This use of sculpted object and drawn action is typical of Morelli's generative art, and his work in Finding Form reverberates with other objects in the Left Gallery (especially the three small chewing gum sculptures by Hannah Wilke) and the imagery in Nubar Alexanian's S.O.P. photographs as well.

posted by the Contemporary