Curatorial Statement
Locations considers recent creative practices that engage with the urban experience. The works in this show explore such issues as the internalization of the conditions of public life, the reconfiguration of the boundaries of public and private life, and the development of a role for the artist in the exploration of these relationships.
All of the artists engage with the subtlety of the urban environment by identifying familiar formal elements and common surfaces. The representation of these urban spaces present opportunities for the chance encounters of everyday life rather than the more usual, larger and somewhat cliched spectacles of city life. For example, Heidi Schlatter’s light boxes use the familiar language of commercial real estate photography that includes imposition of vertical perspectives and sublime minimalism to advertise common public housing in Bushwick, Brooklyn. The images arrest viewers as both potential inhabitants and potential consumers. Finally, however, their falsity and seductive emptiness inevitably deflate the very expectations they raise. Incorporating the local neighborhood from alternative perspectives, Jeff Konigsberg’s site-specific drywall relief references structures including the Board of Education, the gallery, and the artist’s home. These disparate places, presented in tight order, take on a refined sense of geographic location and architectural detail. In contrast, Franziska Lamprecht’s work zeroes in on the individual perspective, subverting the code of uraban anonymity. Lamprecht uses digital technology to render the domestic interiors of strangers she follows through stores. Employing strategies of surveillance, documenting the time and place, translating the observed behaviors of her subjects into imagined private settings, her work breaks down the idea of a unified identity in an urban context in which subjective experience is imagined and exchanged.
The work of the artists included in Locations should be considered not only in light of their idiosyncratic methods of locating the self within the context of the city, but also as secular inquiries into the construction of the individual in the context of the present urban environment.
Susanna Cole and Erin Donnelly September 5, 2002
Susanna Cole is a Ph.D. candidate in the department of Art History and Archeology at Columbia University. Erin Donnelly is Associate Director of Visual and Media Arts at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. The two have collaborated on exhibitions including "Play’s the Thing", the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program Exhibition; "Ground Zero: 01" an online exhibition for the Visual AIDS Gallery; and "Breach" a project by Michael Raeowitz for the Lower East Side Tenement Museum.
Acknowledgements
The Rotunda Gallery gratefully acknowledges the 1999 Leadership Gift of Richard B. Fisher.
The Rotunda Gallery is grateful for the generous support of our exhibition and education programs from the Sally and Milton Avery Foundation, Chase Manhattan Bank Foundation, Con Edison, the Cowles Charitable Trust, Forest City Ratner Companies, the Greenwall Foundation, the Independence Community Foundation, the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, J.P. Morgan, Morgan Stanley Dean Witter, and the New York Community Trust, as well as numerous individuals.
Programs are made possible in part by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs with support from the Office of the Brooklyn Borough President and the Brooklyn Delegation to the New York City Council, the New York State Council on the Arts and the Institute of Museum and Library Services.
The Rotunda Gallery is a project of BRIC/Brooklyn Information & Culture.
September 5 through October 18, 2002
Curated by Susanna Cole and Erin Donnelly