Absence/Excess/Loss

guest curators: Marni Shindelman & Sarah E Webb

April 20 – May 20, 2007
Opening Reception: April 20th 7-10pm

complete list of scheduled events

Maire Kennedy, Chicago, IL, loops 5,000 pull ties into cornucopia forms as she blurs the boundaries between botanical and corporeal anatomies.  
Absence/Excess/Loss is a group exhibition of installation-based work, which considers how the process of repetition informs memory and melancholia. Specifically, how does the creation of repeated objects relate to the act of mourning? This exhibition will consider the work of seven artists - each sharing an affinity for vernacular and domestic materials in which process comes to bear as much meaning as the (final) object.  Each artist will create an installation unique to the gallery space at the Rochester Contemporary, considering how the act of repetition, and the making of multiples, generates memory and meaning.

  Tara Parsons’, New York, NY, handmade latex airplane-shaped balloons are an elegiac tribute to a friend lost during the World Trade Center attack.
 

Penelope Stewart, Toronto, Canada, casts doorknobs in beeswax as both a reference to and marker of the threshold of physical space and spatial memory.

 
 
Andrea Cote, Brooklyn, NY, seeks a place where the simulated, the metaphorical, and the corporeal body converge. By printing directly on the gallery wall with cuttings from her own hair, Cote exposes the anonymous presence of the artists model.
 
Daniela Rumpf, Minneapolis, MN, elegantly fills a linen closet with dish towels, hand knit and then dipped in porcelain, as she questions how material necessity is different from the perceived material needs of American consumer culture.
 
 

Wendy Kawabata, Honolulu, HI, wraps kukui nuts in red thread, in an attempt to regain connection to a lost attachment of home, land, and family.