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NIBBLING THE WHITE CUBE
November 14 - December 12, 2008
The exhibition opens with a reception on Friday, November 14, 5-7 pm.
There will be a Gallery Talk on Sunday, November 16 at 2 pm.
The Anne Reid ’72 Gallery is part
of the Princeton Day School,
650 The Great Road,
Princeton, NJ 08540
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The white cube of the typical modern art gallery “is constructed along laws as rigorous as those for building a medieval church. The outside world must not come in, so windows are usually sealed off. Walls are painted white. The ceiling becomes the source of light…. The art is free ‘to take on its own life’… untouched by time and its vicissitudes.” Brian O’Doherty, Inside the White Cube.
Nine artists are challenging the power of the ‘white cube’ by creating
work that cannot be tamed and relegated to predictable locations within the
neat confines of the gallery. A dynamic energy is unleashed as the artworks
pull, push, probe, and reshape the space. This energy opens and enlivens the
viewer’s sense of the relationship of art to the world we inhabit.
Each artwork seems to be passing through the gallery on its way from and to a place marked by the contingencies of real space and time. The first piece to catch the viewer’s eye is by Jerry Hirniak. Projecting the image of a tree onto the outside wall of the gallery, he provokes an active confrontation between nature and architecture. Berendina Buist uses the movement of images on fabric to evoke the flow of water through the interior of the gallery. Susan Hockaday blends two realities, juxtaposing pieces of photographs of the natural world with photograms of trash to create a mosaic that hovers in front of the gallery wall. Eve Ingalls’ sculpture suggests a flying fragment of nature that has been briefly snagged in foreign territory and will soon be on its way elsewhere. Continuing the nature metaphor, Marsha Levin-Rojer appropriates the gallery floor, rather than the traditional wall, as a backdrop for a mandala-like tape drawing of tangled vines in a forest. With the sounds of a theremin, rain sticks, and a marimba, composer Rita Z. Asch creates the auditory beat of rainfall within the gallery.
Several artists deconstruct the white
cube. Frank Magalhães creates a visual hole in the ceiling through which
the outside world is watching. Drawing with string in space, Margaret Kennard
Johnson builds visual veils that stretch and transform the underlying architecture
of the white cube. A subtle energy charges the resulting space, causing it to
hover before the viewer’s eyes.
John Goodyear turns the gallery thermostat into a readymade. The thermostat
is replicated, a second non-functional version signed with the artist’s
initials and dated. Lighted as a unified work in the gallery, the pair constitutes
a dialectic between non-art and art, non-artist and artist.
The exhibition was curated by MOVIS, a Princeton artists’ group that meets weekly to consider new concepts in the visual arts. Members of the MOVIS group have exhibited widely throughout the United States and internationally, and their work is included in many museum collections.
Eve Ingalls, member of MOVIS