Pariset, Steciw, Wilson
This exhibition focuses on the work of three artists who, despite their often radically different methodologies and disparate materials, continue to explore the untapped artistic potentialities of photographic imagery through the creation of sculptural works. Departing from their two-dimensional sources, this transformational process gives each the ability to create new spatial relationships, imparts materiality on the immaterial, and attempts to challenge the existent visual language of photography.
Aude Pariset’s work evolves from an interest in exploring computer-generated images printed onto organic surfaces. In FX Tridanca, she molds rice paper into the form of large seashells. The imagery printed on the rice paper, however, is not the artist’s own creation but rather is appropriated from the now-defunct all-male, new media collective Paint FX, suggesting feminist undertones. In her newest work, Untitled (Atlas moth/Chob the) Pariset explores the gestures of graffiti using a process of subtractive drawing, by tagging an inkjet print (taken directly from the default of her printer) with clear fixative, subsequently washing the non-waterproof paper. For Pariset, both the digital “paintbrush” originally used to create the imagery in FX Tridanca and this graffiti gesture share the paradox of simultaneously being artistic expressions yet remaining nonspecific and endlessly repeatable.
Kate Steciw’s work incorporates collage and everyday, mundane objects into intangible, abstract images, letting them, as she has stated, "move beyond the 2D and exist in 3 and 4D spaces, or even implied spaces." Her dynamic new multimedia photographic and sculptural works were created as a response to the overabundance of materials, products, and technology available for human consumption. However, rather than becoming an act of protest against consumerism, Steciw’s interest lies in recontextualizing and reframing these familiar, often domestic forms to create strange and often humorous constructions. By combining and arranging imagery sourced from the internet with a variety of materials and textures, her objects are given new and often distorted significance.
Unlike Pariset and Steciw, Wilson’s works begin with a traditional, analog, photographic image. Through processes such as cutting, splicing, bending, or layering, Wilson’s sculptural interventions attempt to compensate for the original image’s failure to accurately reproduce the specific sites they portray. In her most recent new body of work, Wilson encases images of the American landscape into layers of poured concrete. While the natural stratification of the concrete plays against the depicted physical qualities of the landscape, it is the juxtaposition in combining layers of ephemeral images with the heavy, solid, and substantial concrete to create these sculptures that begin to break and fold the actual two-dimensional images into a three-dimensional object, creating visual dissonance and pushing the work outside the boundaries of the frame.
Aude Pariset is a French-born artist living and working in Berlin, Germany. She received her MFA from the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris in 2007. Her work has been exhibited worldwide including in Brussels, Beijing, Zurich, and Malmö. Her second and most recent solo exhibition was held in 2011 at Kwadrat, Berlin. Pariset is also a co-founder of the curatorial platform, Bcc, which emphasizes the use of the Internet to explore the variable conditions by which artwork is authored, circulated, and framed, and has facilitated one-evening exhibitions in Berlin, Paris, and Richmond, Virginia.
Kate Steciw is an artist living and working in Brooklyn. Born in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, Steciw received a BA in Sociology from Smith College and an MFA with a concentration in Photography from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her first book, The Strangeness of This Idea was published by Hassla in June 2010. Exhibiting widely, her most recent solo exhibition took place at Primary Photographic Gallery in the Summer of 2011.
Born in Honolulu, raised in Colorado, and currently living and working in Brooklyn, Letha Wilson earned her BFA from Syracuse University, and an MFA from Hunter College in New York. She has shown at many venues including the Bronx Museum of the Arts, Socrates Sculpture Park, Arko Arts Center, Seoul, and the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art. In 2009 she was a resident at the Santa Fe Art Institute, the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, and was nominated for the Louis Comfort Tiffany Biennial Award. In 2011, Wilson had a solo exhibition at Vox Populi in Philadelphia and was a resident at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts in Omaha, Nebraska.
Role: Curator
Date: January 8—February 26, 2012
Location: toomer labzda gallery, New York, NY
Artists: Aude Pariset, Kate Steciw, Letha Wilson
