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David Maljkovic and Lucy Skaer "Scene, Hold, Ballast" at SculptureCenter, New York
SculptureCenter presents "Scene, Hold, Ballast" a two person exhibition with David Maljkovic and Lucy Skaer, artists whose work shares an engagement with sculpture, film, and distinct approaches to exhibition design. "Scene, Hold, Ballast" conceived as a dialog, will feature new works by Maljkovic and Skaer commissioned through SculptureCenter's Artist in Residence program. The exhibition is guest curated by Fionn Meade.
Lucy Skaer's installations subject the conventional classification of objects and historical references to scrutiny, shifting meaning toward the symbolic and absurd. Often working with preexisting imagery and found forms, Skaer's sculptures, films, and works on paper emphasize repetition and variation even as they retain a gestural immediacy. The impression of an encoded proto-linguistic message arises yet full comprehension remains out of reach. Her surrogate adaptations of Constantin Brancusi's Bird In Space and Newborn sculptures, for example, use familiar forms as a decoy for exploring faltering modes of industrial production and distribution, resulting in the collapse of image and object into a shared psychological space a characteristic of much of her work. Skaer's work re-animates the power of the symbolic that lies beyond obsolescence, as in a recent 35mm film that imagines the memory of a film projector from an abandoned cinema in Leeds, England.
Film, video, and stage scenography likewise play a central role in David Maljkovic's work and his ongoing critical engagement with the legacy of modernism. Constructing future histories via diverted glimpses onto overlooked moments of past innovation, Maljkovic's sculpture, collage, painting, drawing, and architectural mis-en-scene often refer to Yugoslav socialism and the aesthetics of international modernism. Maljkovic mines a rift between the utopian aspirations of former avant-garde strategies, their frequently cataclysmic results, and the present moment. The film Images With Their Own Shadows (2008), for example, is set in the villa and former studio of the influential Croatian artist and architect Vjenceslav Richter (1917–2002), and combines sound clips from Richter's last interview with highly suggestive tableaux vivant of young people, open mouthed in their attempt to speak. Here, the sounds and imagery of the past irrevocably darken the present but the future is made equally contingent through embodied, participatory rehearsal.
at SculptureCenter, Long Island, City, NY
through March 19, 2012
David Maljkovic, Unititled, 2012; Temporary Projection, 2012
David Maljkovic, Temporary Projection (version 2), 2012
David Maljkovic, Sources in the Air, 2012
David Maljkovic, Sources in the Air, 2012; Temporary Projection (version 2), 2012
Lucy Skaer, Margin of July, 2012
Lucy Skaer, Margin of July, 2012; Us to Them, 2012
Lucy Skaer, Us to Them, 2012
All images – Courtesy of SculptureCenter, New York