Anne Wu: There Is No Far and No Near
Smack Mellon – Until Jan 28, 2024 New york, Brooklyn (US)
Smack Mellon presents Anne Wu’s first major solo exhibition in New York City, There Is No Far and No Near, featuring sculptural installations that weave through the gallery’s existing architecture. The sculptures present a series of thresholds composed of the artist’s signature materials: brightly painted wood, polished decorative stainless steel, plastic packing rope, incense sticks, and cast objects.
Visual landscape.
In Wu’s work, the experience of space is best understood as an impression rather than something dimensionally accurate. Rooted in the visual landscape of her home neighborhood in Flushing, Queens, her sculptural practice riffs on the built environment through fragmentation, abstraction, and material verisimilitude. Referential details texture the constructions with specificity, delineating the transformation of a neighborhood from general geo-locality to distinctive place. As culturally-encoded signifiers, incense, plastic rope, and stainless steel railings–some of which were discarded due to fabrication errors–provide punctuation throughout the installation that visually points to, rather than represents, a particular cultural experience.
Claude Bragdon.
The spatial elements of this installation present a loose version of a standard measurement system employed through a playful sense of improvisation. The exhibition’s title comes from a quote by Claude Bragdon, an American architect during the turn of the twentieth century, in Yve-Alain Bois’ essay “Metamorphosis of Axonometry” (1981). A factually accurate method of depicting space, axonometric projection is often used in architectural renderings where the scale of an object does not depend on its relative location. It “abolishes the fixed viewpoint of the spectator and creates several possible viewings of one and the same image…”.
Intuitive delineation.
Formally, Wu’s sculptures follow the intuitive delineation of axonometry as explored by Bois. They appear as uncanny constructs that have been condensed into pragmatically articulated, two-dimensional drawings, then launched back out into spatial reality. The passage of her forms through these soft conversions naturally eliminates some details through reduction, while accumulating other unexpected ones in their rearticulation.
Smack Mellon→ 92 Plymouth Street Brooklyn – New York, NY, USA 11201
◊
Visual artists→
Painters→
Sculptors→
Photographers→
Unexpected Artists→