Appropinquation

For as long as there has been iconography or idols, monuments to ideas, time, and space have been placed in areas of engagement. With sculpture, the floor is burdened with supporting these objects – creating zones of inferred meaning within the viewer’s personal space. Simultaneously, the wall offers a ready template for parallel experiences: tempting, embracing and occasionally expelling. Sometimes this can be subtle, verging on the subliminal, and other times sensational – implying forces that resonate in one’s core.

For the artists in APPROPINQUATION (n. A drawing nigh; approach / the act of coming into near relation or proximity / The act of bringing remote things near), participation is implied and relationships are encouraged within the act of seeing. From the austere to the sybaritic, the way we move around, up to and beside works of art can be a tangential experience. The viewer is invited to consider their personal space as it relates to each object. Approaching this art is encouraged from every angle.

Leslie Baum’s (Chicago) “rabbit holes”, along with her standing paintings, creates an enlarged dioramic experience that both collapses and expands space with the aid of art historical references. Taken in concert with each other, each element of these works create a readymade dialogue as the viewer may see these as symbols or harbingers of what is to come, or what was already there.

Shannon Finley’s (Berlin) work straddles mark making by hand with digital processes to create strangely familiar, yet abstract, visions. The sculptures presented here are a new mode of creating that alludes to maquettes for monuments; built or un-built, that resonates with the context of his hometown of Berlin.

Jamisen Ogg (New York) presents a site-specific oversized mobile constructed from two architectural trusses. Strong yet delicate, this sculpture invites an approach that is cautionary and demarcates, formally and informally, a charged area within the context of the gallery space.

Min Song (Chicago) creates works that traverse multiple mediums from photography to sculpture. Using accessible materials – from found and personal photography to basic building materials – these works create scenarios that utilize mnemonic devices to trigger something that verges on sentimentality, but not quite.

Dannielle Tegeder (New York) With an overt inquisitiveness, Tegeder presents a wall-based installation that incorporates a variety of media (house paint, vellum, wood, frames) into one plane while expanding the meaning of what a composition can be within a specific space. Responding directly to the architecture of the gallery, the networks and systems alluded to are complicated, while meant to encourage contemplation.