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    In Practice Projects, Fall 2010

    In Practice Projects, Fall 2010

    Sep 13–Nov 29, 2010

    Justin Matherly, Lior Shvil, Josh Tonsfeldt, and Viola Yeşiltaç
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    Justin Matherly's sculptures consist of ambulatory equipment (walkers, crutches, shower chairs) that have been cut and reconfigured to hold up concrete forms that recall misfigured bodies, roughhewn monuments, and abject accretions alike. Influenced by the artist's ongoing research into the writings of the Marquis de Sade and psychoanalytic philosophy, Matherly's new series of sculptures and related prints take up the effaced Belvedere Torso of Ancient Greece as an additional inspiration.

    Occupying a space somewhere between storytelling and spectacle, the video and sculpture installations of Lior Shvil present such invented personas as Cherry Bomb and The Kosher Butcher by way of addressing the fragmented representation of politics and gender in contemporary society. Embracing the roles of director, actor, narrator, editor, and set designer, Shvil's experiments in theatrical production explore the comic territory of the jester as he flirts with cultural stereotypes and satirizes political ideologies. A new video and sculptural installation will enter further into the performative underworld of Shvil's Kosher Butcher character.

    Josh Tonsfeldt makes videos, photographs, drawings, and sculptures that bring together materials from the urban environment with quietly observed moments in nature. Delicate and spare sculptures made from found materials often sourced nearby the exhibition venue interact with videos that depict unscripted scenarios of everyday gestures, animal behavior, and natural phenomena, while a varied approach to image-making may include photographs and digital scans alongside rubbings and other ephemeral surfaces in various states of decay and transformation. New video work will accompany a sculptural intervention in the lower level gallery space that transposes the artist's response to the city.

    Viola Yesiltac works with photography, drawing, sculpture, and performance in installations that draw from an ongoing archive of site-specific photographic imagery. Taken from various locales-a defunct signage factory, domestic settings, details of interior design, and images of her immediate surroundings-Yesiltac reduces the information of a given context to a series of discrete views that serve as the basis for associative material responses. Sumi ink drawings, partitions, and wall and floor reliefs combine to re-imagine the quotidian as a surface for projection, poetic narrative, and superimposed design. A new slide series of sumi ink drawings on photographic imagery, Exterior, Interior, Signage Series, 2009-10, provides the basis for a site-specific installation.

    Sponsors

    SculptureCenter's programs are supported in part by contributions from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts; the Kraus Family Foundation; the New York State Council on the Arts, The New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, the Lily Auchincloss Foundation; Peter Jay Sharp Foundation; the Foundation for Contemporary Arts; The Greenwall Foundation; The Tides Foundation, advised by the Lambent Foundation and contributions from our Board of Trustees and many generous individuals.