II Pimento (Jammer), 1975-76, Red silk, wood poles, 78" (H) x 126" (W) x 1 1/2" (D)
ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG
JAMMERS
SATURDAY, OCTOBER 3, 2009
7:30- 9:00 PM OPENING RECEPTION
THROUGH OCTOBER 31, 2009
LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA 90036
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In 1975 Robert Rauschenberg (1925-2008) spent several weeks in an ashram in Ahmedabad, India, a major center for vibrant fabric dyes and textile production. Until his visit to India he did not consider luxuriant silks to be a material he would be comfortable with using. However seeing its prevalence, abundance and lack of hierarchy, it became a context he felt he could be comfortable with. Upon return to his home in Captiva, Florida, he executed a series of works in 1975 and 1976 called the Jammers, which also reflected upon the nautical environment of his adopted home, with the series’ title derived from the Windjammer, a sailing vessel. The Jammers were first exhibited at Ace Gallery Venice in 1976.
Using a combination of fabrics; translucent silk or satin in pure solid colors, each are either attached to the wall directly or accompanied by rattan poles, or a combination of both, staking out the wall space, expanding, as they did, the concept of painting, sculpture and installation. The use of the intrinsic colors or white translucency of fabric also indirectly refer to his own silk-screen process within his paintings, and relate back in particular to the freestanding construction he made for one of Merce Cunningham’s stage-sets, the bright red fabric and mixed media Minutiae (1954). It could be said that his stage sets for Cunningham contained the umbilical cord that lead to the Jammers series.
Each individual Jammer is titled, some incorporate discarded or pre-existing objects; Stallion is of black satin, while others specifically refer to the sea i.e. Seadog or Windfall - transparent white, a recepticle for found tincans stripped of their labels, while Spoke has the additional element of a glass jug, another found object. They are evocative of sails, or the spontaneous colors upon clotheslines. Melding Eastern and Western traditions in the most abstract language of pure color and form, perhaps they come closest to Rauschenberg’s time at Black Mountain College with Josef Albers, after which in 1951 he was soon to create his famous monochromatic White Paintings that were followed by his Black then Red Paintings (1953-4). As the White Paintings were created in panels, the Jammers also are seamed in panels, and while these were apparently the most simplistic and reductive artworks, they were also in the end, the most complex, as reflectors for all the innuendoes of light and shadows, the artworks in flux with the time of day.
LINC Housing System, 1969/ 2009, LINC Site Model, Craig Hodgetts, Hodgetts+Fung Design and Architecture.
Mixed Media. 38" (H) x 30" (W)
CRAIG HODGETTS
PLAYMAKER
CURATED BY SYLVIA LAVIN
SATURDAY, OCTOBER 3, 2009
7:30- 9:00 PM OPENING RECEPTION
THROUGH OCTOBER 31, 2009
LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA 90036
WWW.ACEGALLERY.NET
Ace Gallery presents an exhibition exploring work produced in the 1960s and 70s by one of LA’s architectural radicals, Craig Hodgetts – a leading figure in the LA community of experimental design, curated by Sylvia Lavin, Director of Hi-C, a UCLA based group of young designers and scholars committed to advancing the public consideration of architectural culture.
CRAIG HODGETTS, PLAYMAKER presents six innovative projects by Hodgetts and collaborators produced between 1965 and 1978. The range of objects in the exhibition includes vacuum-formed models, storyboards for environmentally themed movies and cardboard furniture. Together, these widely varied projects explore a set of issues that have become urgent for architecture once again, from new materials and technologies, prefabrication and housing, to mass media and entertainment. The exhibition dramatizes the playful excitement that drove one of the most inventive periods in American architectural and design history and brings to the fore the period’s many surprising resonances with contemporary architecture.
Craig Hodgetts is the co-founder and Creative Director of Hodgetts+Fung Design and Architecture. Since 1984, Hodgetts’ architectural practice has been in partnership with equally acclaimed architect Hsinming Fung, currently the Graduate Program Director at SCI-Arc. They reside and work in Los Angeles. Hodgetts has received numerous awards including the Architecture Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Chrysler Award for Innovation in Design, and the 2006 Gold Medal from the AIA Los Angeles. Hodgetts was a founding Dean of the California Institute of the Arts and currently is a professor of Architecture and Urban Design at UCLA.
The curator of this exhibition, Sylvia Lavin, is Professor and Director of Critical Studies and M.A./PhD programs at UCLA’s Department of Architecture and Urban Design. Lavin has recently launched Hi-C, a program in which UCLA doctoral and design students collaborate on exhibits, symposia and publications that establish a forum for wide discussion of experimental work in architecture. Lavin’s forthcoming books The Flash in the Pan and Other Forms of Architectural Contemporaneity (MIT Press) and Kissing Architecture (Princeton University Press) will be released in 2010.
light/ALBERS, Installation view, Ace Gallery 2009
HEATHER CARSON
light/ALBERS
SATURDAY, OCTOBER 3, 2009
7:30- 9:00 PM OPENING RECEPTION
THROUGH OCTOBER 31, 2009
LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA 90036
WWW.ACEGALLERY.NET
Heather Carson’s formal and conceptual investigations into the properties of light draw together the historic strands of East Coast Minimalism and West Coast Light and Space. Throughout her thirty year international career as a lighting designer, Carson has wielded light in a muscular fashion exploring its color temperatures and physical properties.
Long fascinated by high intensity discharge sources such as sodium vapor and metal halide, as well as fluorescent tubes, her aesthetic is determined by the specificity of the choice of materials. Drawing inspiration from contemporary physics, deconstructivist architecture and minimalism in sculpture, rather than strictly narrative, to consider structures for light in theatre, she says “I have sought to create light as a visceral, active presence that has its own logic and structure, co-existing with the action – often in conflict – not there simply to better “see” what is happening onstage.”
Her investigations in the theatre have radically informed her installation work, and her installation work has in turn refined her theatre work. This new series, light/ALBERS, marks a departure from her previous body of work entitled light/GRIDS begun in 1995 and her mainstay vocabulary of sodium vapor and fluorescent light which sequenced lights on and off to use the lights as well as the light produced to physically build with light. These new wall works hew more closely to the formal properties of painting than installation, are static, and use only white fluorescent and discharge sources.
Rather than using the site or the materials as a departure point, these wall-works mine the architectural underpinnings of Josef Albers’ paintings. Seeing Albers’ Study for Homage to the Square: Dimly Reflected (1963) and his use of shades of grey (grey-on-grey squares) triggered the idea of exploring the use of shades of white light and shadow instead of color as the “carrier of the pictorial action,” creating an updated tribute to the “meditation panels” Albers sought. For Carson, each light piece is not a direct reference to an individual Albers painting but to the oeuvre at large.
Heather Carson has designed lighting in the US and internationally for over 150 productions in theatre, opera, dance, concert and video primarily in New York theatre and European avant-garde opera. She was head of the lighting programs at Penn State and Cal Arts and has taught at NYU, Smith College, Bard College, Sci-Arc, UCSD and UCLA. She is a recipient of the 1998/99 Rome Prize, a 1997 Fellowship from the Skowhegan Art Program, a 1998 and 2004 New York Foundation for the Arts Artists Fellowship in Architecture/Environmental Structures, a 1999 Graham Foundation for the Advancement of the Fine Arts, and a 2006 Durfee Foundation Grant.
After 25 years based in New York, she now lives and works in Los Angeles.
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