Nairy Baghramian's RETAINER and DOUBLE LIFE Exhibitions Open at SculptureCenter Today

SculptureCenter has announced its winter exhibitions, featuring Nairy Baghramian's Retainer and Double Life, running today, January 14 through March 25, 2013. The opening reception is slated for Sunday, January 13 from 5 to 7 p.m.

NAIRY BAGHRAMIAN: RETAINER

This will be Baghramian's first exhibition in the United States. Baghramian's work examines political and social systems of power and encompasses questions of context, production, and reception within contemporary art.

With the support of our Artist-in-Residence commissioning program, Baghramian has produced a new work for SculptureCenter's main exhibition space that is suggestive of a corrective prosthesis for the building. For Baghramian, exhibition spaces are conceptual structures as much as they are habitable buildings. Their historically determined design and layout become both reference and structure of the work. This new sculpture, constructed from chromed struts draped with "sheets" of cast silicon, will occupy the entire main exhibition space. Partially industrially fabricated and partially handmade, the work provokes questions about the potential for sculpture and art as an aesthetic tool, but also highlights art's dependency on its own context.

DOUBLE LIFE
PRESENTED THROUGH THE IN PRACTICE PROGRAM

Korakrit Arunanondchai, David Berezin, Paul Branca, Lea Cetera, Rachel Foullon, Molly Lowe, Shana Lutker, S. A. C. (Student Art Collective) with Justin Lieberman, Julia Sherman, and Bryan Zanisnik

The exhibition Double Life brings together a group of artists who share a performance-based approach to sculpture. Common strategies include inhabiting the physical site of exhibition, leaving indexical marks on images of their own making, and re-contextualizing or re-animating various objects, images, and readymades. Adopting a sense of synchronistic time that is at once immediate but also located in moments of reflection, these artists investigate themes such as identity construction, authorship, and alienation amidst current conditions that are multicultural, hyper-mediated, and increasingly focused on self-presentation. Double Life examines the role of the contemporary artist and our collective nature as self-performers, as well as our identification with and attachments to everyday objects.

The newly commissioned projects presented in Double Life were created as part of SculptureCenter's In Practice program. In Practice supports the creation and presentation of new work by emerging artists and reflects diverse approaches to contemporary sculpture. Artists are selected through an open call for proposals and are provided with an honorarium, production budget, fabrication and installation assistance, as well as invaluable curatorial and administrative support. This year SculptureCenter received over 800 applications from artists worldwide.

SculptureCenter is located at 44-19 Purves Street, Long Island City, New York. Call 718.361.1750 or visit www.sculpture-center.org for more information.

Image: Nairy Baghramian, The Snag.Courtesy the artist.