New work by Andy Mattern, Brent Erickson, David Bowen and Kristina Estell
June 14 - June 29, 2013
Opening Reception
Friday June 14th, 7-11pm
Open Gallery hours
Thur, Fri & Sat from 3-7pm
The Lost, the Discarded and the Beautiful is an exhibition at Prøve
Gallery that explores legacies of American culture through abandoned
objects. Whether these objects are hurdling through outer space,
accidentally dropped on city streets, or overlooked in plain sight, each
of the four artists in this exhibition regards them with a special
sense of awe.
New photographic works by Andy Mattern represent a collection of
inscrutable urban artifacts that are both entirely common and visually
adrift. Through a process of cataloging similar found objects, this new
body of work shifts the waste of modern life into the uncanny. By
photographing these discarded items in the studio, Mattern removes their
environmental context and allows us to inspect them without
distraction. This special scrutiny elevates these mass-produced objects
and a raises the idea of their separate histories and inevitable fates.
Also dealing with the everyday, Brent Erickson uses the
iconography of the office chair to explore contemporary human
experience. Erickson’s large-scale wall drawings obfuscate this common
form through layering and repetition. The first impression of his
monumental wall drawings is dominated by geometric pattern, but, upon
deeper inspection, individual chairs emerge from the intricate design
and reveal their familiar selves. In these works, Erickson re-imagines
the objects of our daily life with a playful and theatrical wit.
Debuting at Prøve Gallery, the new collaborative installation by
David Bowen and Kristina Estell takes space travel and extra planetary
measurement as its subject. In 1977, NASA launched Voyager I to explore
Jupiter and Saturn. After completing that mission, the probe continued
moving outward into deep space, and still does to this day. Incredibly,
it continues to transmit information back to Earth even though it is
well beyond Pluto and nearing the edge of the heliosphere. Bowen and
Estell have taken the stream of live location data from the probe and
integrated it into a real-time light installation that considers the
limits of human exploration and the threshold between contact and
oblivion.
* At the opening, Andy Mattern will sign copies of two
self-published artist books Driven Snow and Everyone I Never Knew as the
culmination of his Minnesota State Arts Board Artist Initiative Grant.
download the poster
download the press release
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